THE YOUNG QUEENS CONDUCT THE SWARMS. 67 



endeavoured to reach the extremity of her abdomen with 

 her fore feet, and this motion was very sagaciously con- 

 strued by Mr. Huber into a desire on the part of the queen 

 to withdraw the substance, which was still appended to 

 her tail. After pulling and tugging for a considerable time, 

 the queen succeeded in disuniting the substance from the 

 extremity of her abdomen, and it fell exactly where Mr. 

 Huber wished it should fall, that is, it fell straight before 

 him. He now expected to find a shapeless mass of coagu- 

 lated fluid, but his surprise was boundless, when he dis- 

 covered the interesting object which lay before him, to be 

 nothing less than the genital organ of the male, that had 

 rendered this queen a mother. But Huber very justly says, 

 and we give him full credit for his assertion, that on 

 this occasion he could not credit his own eyes ; and he 

 further declares, that this discovery of the genital organ of 

 the male being found in the female, is a mystery which he 

 will not pretend to solve ; and his candour carries him so 

 far as to admit, that when he is describing the retarded 

 impregnation of the queen, he finds himself in a dilemma, 

 from which he cannot extricate himself. It is, in fact, one 

 of the principal features of Huber's theory, that the queen 

 does not begin to lay her eggs until forty-six hours after 

 impregnation ; but from repeated experiments we are enabled 

 positively to deny the truth of that statement. We will 

 suppose a swarm to be newly settled, and the first inquiry 

 then is, whether the queen, which accompanied that swarm, 

 be the old queen of the parent hive, or one of the young 

 queens of the season ? It is the opinion of Huber, that it 

 is the former, who always departs with the swarm ; this is, 

 however, at direct variance with our own experience, 

 having had the same queen in a hive for four years, and 

 whose wings we clipped for the express purpose of ascer- 

 taining the fact of the parent queen departing, according to 

 the statement of Huber, with the first swarm. 

 d 6 



