5 PHYSIOLOGY OF THE HONEY-BEE. 
128. In the Winter of 1851-2, the writer submitted for 
scientific examination several queen-bees to Dr. Joseph 
Leidy, of Philadelphia, who had the highest reputation both 
at home and abroad, as a naturalist and microscopic anat- 
omist. He found, in making his dissections, a small globu- 
lar sac, about 3 of an inch in diameter, communicating 
with the oviduct, and filled with a whitish fluid; this fluid, 
when examined under the microscope, abounded in the 
spermatozoids* which characterize the seminal fluid. <A 
comparison of this substance, later in the season, with the 
semen of a drone, proved them to be exactly alike. 
129. These examinations have settled, on the impreg- 
nable basis of demonstration, the mode in which the eggs of 
the queen are fecundated. In descending the oviduct to 
be deposited in the cells, they pass by the mouth of this 
seminal sac, or ‘‘ spermatheca,’’ and receive a portion of its 
fertilizing contents. Small as it is, it contains sufficient to 
impregnate millions of eggs. In precisely the same way, 
the mother-wasps and hornets are fecundated. The females 
only of these insects survive the Winter, and often a single 
one begins the construction of a nest, in which at first only 
a few eggs are deposited. How could these eggs hatch, if 
the females had not been impregnated the previous season? 
Dissection proves that they have a spermatheca similar to 
that of the queen-bee. It never seems to have occurred to 
the opponents of Huber, that the existence of a permanent- 
ly-impregnated mother-wasp is quite as difficult to be ac- 
counted for, as the existence of a similarly impregnated 
queen-bee. 
130. The celebrated Swammerdam, in his observations 
= Spermatozoids are the living germs of the seminal fluid. 
+ Prof. Siebold, in 1843, examined the spermatheca of the queen-bee, and found 
it after copulation, filled with the seminal fluid of the drone. Atthattime, Api- 
arists paid no attention to his views, but considered them, as he says, to be 
only ‘‘theoretuat stuff.’? It seems, then, that Prof. Leidy’s dissection was 
not, as we had hitherto supposed, the first, of an impregnated spermatheca. 
