A CHAPTER OF SPECULATIONS. 93 
13. Bees of colonies containing fertile and unfertile 
queens, should not be put together without first ‘ break- 
ing them up,” i. e., inducing them to fill with honey, and 
destroying the unfertile queen. 
14, Natural swarming, always uncertain and perplexing, 
exposes the bee-heeper to much loss of time and money; while 
artifical swarming, securing at all times the presence of a worker- 
laying queen, doing away with all watching, and loss by flight 
to the woods, 1s both swre and economucal. 
A CHAPTER OF SPECULATIONS, 
The production of sex—has the queen any volition in it? If 
the queen be watched during the early spring, while en- 
gaged in depositing eggs, she will be observed to pass 
by the drone cells ; but when the blossoms begin to yield 
honey in abundance, and bees become numerous, and dis- 
posed to swarm, the drone cells are prepared and eggs 
deposited therein. These latter eggs produce drones © 
only, the kind of cell in which the egg is deposited seem- 
ang to determine, for the most part, the sex of the bee. It 
is found that eggs laid in drone cells produce drones only, 
while eggs transferred from drone to worker cells still 
produce drones. What determines the sex—the queen, 
the cell, or the nursing bees? The prevalent theory hag 
been, that the sperm sack of the queen, in the act of cop- 
ulation with the drone, becomes filled with the sperm or 
vitalizing fluid of the male, without which all eggs pos- 
sess sufficient vitality to germinate. Plausibility is giv- 
en to this theory by the fact that the sperm sac of an un- 
fecundated queen is found to be destitute of spermatozoa, 
while that of a fertile one is filled with them. 
