The Life of the Bee 
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, etc. ‘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 generally incapable of providing 
for their subsistence, 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; and each of these 
will possess millions of the spermatozoa 
whereof it is impossible that a single one 
can have penetrated into the organism of 
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