36 
THE HIVE AND HONEY-BEE. 
present (Plate XVIII.), to my readers. The small globu¬ 
lar sac (JD), communicating with the oviduct (-E), which 
he thought secreted a fluid for sticking the eggs to the 
base of the cells, is the seminal reservoir, or spermatheca. 
Any one who will carefully dissect a queen-bee, may see 
this sac, even ■with the naked eye. 
It will be seen that the ovaries (G and IT) are double, 
each consisting of an amazing number of ducts* filled 
with eggs, which gradually increase in size.f 
Huber, while experimenting to ascertain how the queen 
was fecundated, confined some young ones to their hives 
by contracting the entrances, so that they were more than 
three weeks old before they could go in search of the 
drones. To his amazement, the queens whose impregna¬ 
tion was thus retarded never laid any eggs but such as 
produced drones! 
He tried this experiment repeatedly, but always with 
the same result. Bee-keepers, even from the time ot 
Aristotle, had observed that all the brood in a hive were 
occasionally drones. Before attempting to explain this 
astonishing fact, I must call the attention of the reader to 
another of the mysteries of the bee-hive. 
It has already been stated, that the workers ave proved 
by dissection to be females which under ordinary cir¬ 
cumstances are barren. Occasionally, some of them 
appear to be sufficiently developed to be capable of laying 
eggs ; but these eggs, like those of queens whose impreg¬ 
nation has been retarded, always produce drones! Some- 
• The ducts in this cut arc represented as more numerous than those in Swam 
merdam’s drawing. 
\ Since the first edition of this work was issued, I have ascertained that Posol 
(page 54) describes the oviduct of the queen, the spermatheca and its contents, 
and the use of tho latter in impregnating the passing egg. His work was published 
at Munich, in 1784. Itsocms also from his work (page 36), that before the inves¬ 
tigations of Huber, Jansha, the boe-keoper royal of Maria Theresa, had discovered 
the fact that the young queeus leave their hive in search of the drones. 
