158 PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 
tive animosity which stimulates the fertile ones to attack 
their rivals?. Thus she seems to own that she is not 
equal to the duties of her station, and can tolerate an- 
other to discharge them in her room. When we 
consider how much virgin queens are slighted by their 
subjects, we may suppose that nature urges them to take 
the opportunity of the first warm day, when the males 
fly forth, to pair with one of them. 
When fecundation has not been retarded, forty-six 
hours after it has taken place, the queen begins to lay 
egos that will produce workers, and continues for the 
subsequent eleven months, more or less, to lay them 
solely; and it is only after this period that an uninter- 
rupted laying of male eggs commences.—But when it 
has been retarded, after the same number of hours she 
begins laying male eggs, and continues to produce these 
alone during her whole life. From hence it should seem 
to follow, that the former kind of eggs are first in the 
oviducts, and, if impregnation be not effected within a 
given time, that all the worker embryos perish. Yet 
how this can take place with respect to those that in a 
fertile queen should succeed the laying of male egos, or 
‘be preduced in the second year of her life, seems diffi- 
‘cult to conceive ;—or how the male embryos escape this 
fate, which destroys all the females, both those that are 
to precede them and those that are to follow them. Is 
it impossible that the sex of the embryo may be deter- 
mined by the period at which the aura seminalis vivifies 
‘it, and by the state of the ovary at that time? In 
# Huber, i, 319-— 
