The Young Queens 
But she is still a virgin. To become as was 
the mother before her, it is essential that 
she should meet the male within the first 
twenty days of her life. Should the event 
for some reason be delayed beyond this 
period, her virginity becomes irrevocable. 
And yet we have seen that she is not sterile, 
virgin though she be. There confronts us 
here the great mystery—or precaution—of 
nature, that is known as parthenogenesis, 
and is common to a certain number of 
insects, such as the aphides, the lepidoptera 
of the Psyche genus, the hymenoptera of the 
Cynipede family, &c. The virgin queen is 
able to lay, but from all the eggs that she 
will deposit in the cells, be these large or 
small, there will issue males alone; and as 
these never work, as they live at the expense 
of the females, as they never go foraging 
except on their own account, and are gener- 
ally incapable of providing for their sub- 
sistence, the result will be, at the end 
of some weeks, that the last exhausted 
worker will perish, and the colony be ruined 
and totally annihilated. The queen, we 
have said, will produce thousands of drones, 
219 
