NATURAL HISTORY OF THE HONEY-BKE. 
35 
spermatozoa which characterizes the seminal fluid. A 
comparison of this suhstaiice, later in the season, with the 
semen of a drone, proved them to he exactly alike. 
These examinations have settled, on the impregnable 
basis of demonstration, the mode in which the eggs of the 
queen are vivified. In descending the oviduct to be 
deposited in the cells, they pass by the mouth of this semi¬ 
nal sac, or “ spermatheca," and receive a portion of its fer¬ 
tilizing contents. ■ Small as it is, it contains sufficient to 
impregnate hundreds of thousands of eggs. In precisely 
the same way, the mother-wasps and hornets are fecund¬ 
ated. The females only of these insects survive the Win¬ 
ter, and often a single one begins the construction of a 
nest, in which at first only a few eggs are deposited. How 
could these eggs hatch, if the females had not been impreg¬ 
nated the previous season ? Dissection proves th.at they 
liave a spermatheca similar to that of the queen-bee. It 
never seems to have occurred to the opponents of Huber, 
that the existence of a 
permanently impregnated 
mother-wasp is quite as 
difficult to be accounted 
for, as the existence of 
a similarly impregnated 
queen-bee. 
The celebrated Swam¬ 
merdam, in his observa¬ 
tions upon insects, made 
in the latter part of the 
seventeenth century, has 
given a highly magni¬ 
fied drawing of the ova¬ 
ries of the queen-bee, a 
reduced copy of which I 
