22 
lieved at one time that this might be the case, until, in 
the summer of 1864 I discovered eggs in the worker- 
cells not quite one-eighth of an inch in depth. I at 
once removed this piece of comb to my observing hive, 
(it having no queen,) and I now observed minutely the 
result. The bees built the cells to their natural depth, 
and the bees hatched from them proved perfectly devel- 
oped workers. Here the question arose what caused 
the compression that pressed the spermatheca so as to 
fecundate the egg? when it is impossible, from the 
shape of the queen, to have such cells cause even the 
slightest pressure on her in the region where the sper- 
matheca is situated. The fact led me to believe that 
the queen can effect or omit the impregnation of the 
egg at pleasure. 
From the theory of impregnation above given it will 
be seen that any impure impregnation does effect the 
worker egg, and as the queen is raised from such an 
egg, only impure queens can be the result ; whilst under 
the same theory of impregnation the drones of an 
Italian queen, impregdated by a black drone, must be 
pure Italians, yet some writers claim that impregnation 
has a tendency to effect the drone progeny, so that a 
pure Italian queen, when impregnated with a black 
drone, would produce drones slightly impure ; to settle 
this controversy as far as possible, prior to the writing 
of this work, I made a series of experiments, by having 
a number of queens impregnated in confinement. 
