116 OPINIONS OF REAUMUR AND DUCHET. 



would be enlarged or contracted according to the particular 

 cell in which the egg was laid. 



This opinion is, however, by no means singular, for we 

 find it supported by the authority of the most celebrated 

 naturalists, and, indeed, by all, who have not blindly at- 

 tached themselves to the theory of Huber, and suffered 

 themselves to be led and misled by his crude and unproven 

 statements, 



Reaumur, in the fifth volume of his History of Insects, 

 says, page 399, " The queen bee appears to know the exact 

 kind of bee which is to spring from the egg which she is on 

 the point of laying, as she takes particular care not to de- 

 posit an egg in a drone cell, from which a common bee is 

 to spring, and she never deposits an egg in one of the little 

 common cells, from which a drone is to be produced." 



Duchet says, in his Culture des Abeilles, page 25, in de- 

 scribing the nature of a queen bee, " Her chief and most 

 important destination is to populate the hive, and to multiply 

 the species, not only by the deposition of eggs from which 

 queens resembling herself are to spring, but also those from 

 which the common bees are to be produced ; and incredible 

 as it may appear, she also lays the eggs from which the 

 drones are to emanate. This triple deposition is executed 

 with an astonishing discernment, without committing the 

 slightest mistake in placing an egg in any other cell than in 

 that, which particularly belongs to the species that is to be 

 bred in them." 



Strange, however, as it may appear, Huber himself ac- 

 knowledges these statements to be true, for he allows that 

 the queen is never mistaken in the choice of the cells in 

 which the eggs are to be deposited, " never failing," he says, 

 " to lay those of workers in small cells, and those of drones, 

 or males, in larger ones;" but he immediately qualifies that 

 admission by saying, that this knowledge of the queen all 



