58 OVIDUCTS OF THE QUEEN. 



although there was not a single drone in the hive. It is 

 very easy for the mind to conceive a cluster of eggs to be 

 fecundated by a single act of the male, as is witnessed in 

 the fish and the frog, and, indeed, in almost all insects ; but 

 it must, indeed, be a wild bound of the imagination which 

 can entertain the doctrine of an almost infinite number of 

 eggs being fructified in the ovarium of an insect, in the year 

 1837, which eggs, however, were actually at that time not in 

 existence, by an act of the male committed in 1835 or 1836*. 

 In the case of the silkworm, and of almost all flies, the eggs 

 in the ovarium of the female are fructified by a single act of 

 the male, and we would most readily accede the point, that 

 analogically considered, the same case might take place with 

 the eggs in the ovarium of the queen bee, but there exists a 

 wide difference in the nature of the two insects. At the 

 time when the act of coition takes place between the moths 

 of the silkworms, all the eggs which the female will lay are 

 existing in her ovarium, their number at that time are 

 definite, and no after-growth or accumulation takes place, 

 but it is otherwise constituted with the queen bee ; from the 

 moment that she begins to lay her eggs, they are in a state 

 of gradual production and growth. We once counted three 

 hundred and five oviducts in a queen bee, and in each 

 oviduct there were eighteen eggs, thus, three hundred and 

 five multiplied by eighteen, gives the enormous sum of five 

 thousand nine hundred and forty eggs in one female insect, 

 and yet all of them so differing in size, that the rudiments 

 of the last were scarcely perceptible. Consistently, there- 

 fore, with this experience, the eggs which are laid in the 

 month of May were not in the ovarium of the queen in the 



* It must be admitted that Huber does not exactly affirm that the eggs are 

 n the ovarium, but the system on that very account becomes still more diffi- 

 cult of comprehension and belief. An everlastingly fecundated ovarium by a 

 single act of the male, and the hypothesis of self-fecundation, stand nearly 

 upon similar grounds of authenticity. 



