ORGANS OF THE DRONE. 207 



the deliverance of the spermatophore, leaving his 

 abdomen surprisingly flattened and reduced, the organ 

 is torn from his bodv, in a manner respecting which 

 we have nothing better than hypothesis (or reputed 

 observation, which can hardly be regarded as either 

 conclusive or satisfactory). His death follows, but 

 certainly not so instantaneously as some have asserted, 

 and the queen returns to the hive, bearing at the 

 extremity of her abdomen the marks of her impreg- 

 nation, as protruding shreds of torn membrane, to be 

 dragged away, dried and shrivelled, during the next 

 twenty-four hours. She is now more than a female; 

 she has within herself the potency of the two sexes, 

 and, during the term of her whole natural existence, 

 she will be able to determine and accomplish, in 

 time and number, within her own body, the mystical 

 union of male and female elements which constitutes 

 the act of fertilisation. 



The powers of the drone just described are, almost 

 with certainty, not alone true for those brought up 

 in the normal cells of their sex, the issue of a fertilised 

 mother, but for all indifferently. Hereafter we shall 

 more fully explain that the egg yielding the drone is 

 unfertilised, so that those born of mothers that have 

 never mated (drone breeders) are as perfectly de- 

 veloped and as fully virile as the others. Dwarf 

 drones also, raised accidentally in worker cells, or 

 those from the eggs of so-called fertile workers, or 

 workers which, although incapable of impregnation, 

 have yet commenced ovipositing, seem not one whit 

 behind the rest. Leuckart has claimed to have well 

 established this fact for some drones produced by an 



