54 PHTSIOLOGT OP THE HONEY-BEE. 



128. In the Winter of 1851-2, the writer submitted for 

 scientiiic examination several queen-bees to Dr. Joseph 

 Leidy, of Philadelphia, who had the highest reputation both 

 at home and abroad, as a naturaUst and microscopic anat- 

 omist. He found, in making his dissections, a small globu- 

 lar sac, about -^-g 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, f 



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 



* typermatozoids are the living germs of the seminal fluid. 



fProf. SieboM,inl^t.'J, examiQcd the spermatheca of thequcen-bee, andfound 

 itaftercopulation,1illedwith the seminal fluid of the drone. Attliattime, Api- 

 arists paid no attfiitioi) to his views, but considered them, as he says, to be 

 only 'U.hrorrh'fi' ■^^'J/'." It set^ms, then, that Prof. Lcidy's dissection was 

 not, as we had hitherto supposed, the lirst, of ayj imjjregnated spermatheca. 



