374 - PERFECT SOCIETIES OF INSECTS. 
station, and can tolerate another 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 eggs 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 uninterrupted laying of male 
eges 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 eggs, or be produced in the second year of her 
life, seems difficult to conceive ;—or how the male embryos escape this 
fate, which destroys all the female, 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 determined by the period at which the aura seminalis vivi- 
fies it, and by the state of the ovary at that time? In one state of the 
ovary this principle may cause the embryos to become workers, in another 
males. And something of this kind perhaps may be the cause of herma- 
phrodites in other animals. But this I give merely as conjecture?: the 
truth seems enveloped in mystery that we cannot yet penetrate. Huber 
is of opinion that a single impregnation fertilises all the eggs that a queen 
will produce during her whole life, which is sometimes more than two 
years.? But of this enough. 
I said that forty-six hours after impregnation the queen begins laying 
worker eggs ;—this is not, however, invariable. When her impregnation 
takes place late in the year, she does not begin laying till the following 
spring. Schirach asserts, that in one season a single female will lay from 
70,000 to 100,000 eggs.8 Reaumur says, that upon an average she lays 
about two hundred in a day, a moderate swarm consisting of 12,000, which 
are laid in two months ; and Huber, that she lays above a hundred. All 
these statements, the observations being made in different climates, and 
perhaps under different circumstances, may be true. The laying of worker 
eggs begins in February, sometimes so early as January. After this, in 
the spring, the great laying of male eges commences, lasting thirty days; 1 
which time about 2000 of these eggs are laid. Another laying of them, 
but less considerable, takes place in autumn. In the season of oviposition, 
the queen may be discerned traversing the combs in all directions with a 
slow step, and seeking for cells proper to receive her eggs. As she 
walks she keeps her head inclined, and seems to examine, one by one, all 
the cells she meets with. When she finds one to her purpose, she imme- 
1 This conjecture receives strong confirmation from the following observations of 
Sir E. Home, which I met with since it came into my mind. From the nipples 
Re in man, which sometimes even afford mills, and from the general analogy 
etween the male and female organs of generation, he supposes the germ 18 0! 
ginally fitted to become either sex; and that which it shall be is determined 2! 
the time of impregnation by some unknown cause.—Philos. Trans., 1799, 107. 
2 i. 106—, 8 Schirach, 7. 18. 
4 Schirach, 18. Thorley, 105. 
