38 
THE HIVE AND HONEY-BEE. 
in the small or worker-cells, and that she makes no mis¬ 
takes. Dzierzon inferred, therefore, that there was some 
way in which she was able to decide the sex of the egg 
before it was laid, and that she must have such a control 
over the mouth of the seminal sac as to be able to extrude 
her eggs, allowing them at will to receive or not a portion 
of its fertilizing contents. In this way he thought she 
determined their sex, according to the size of the cells 
in which she laid them. 
My friend, Mr. Samuel Wagner, of York, Pennsyl¬ 
vania, has advanced a highly ingenious theory, which 
accounts for all the facts, without admitting that the 
queen has any special knowledge or will on the subject. 
He supposes that when she deposits her eggs in the 
worker-cells, her body is slightly compressed by their 
size, thus causing the eggs as they pass the spennatheea 
to receive its vivifying influence. On the contrary, when 
she is laying in drone-cells, as this compression cannot 
take place, the mouth of the spennatheea is kept closed, 
and the eggs are necessarily unfecundated. 
In the Autumn of 1852, my assistant found a young 
queen whose progeny consisted entirely of drones. The 
colony had been formed by removing a few combs con¬ 
taining bees, brood, and eggs, from another hive, and had 
raised a new queen. Some eggs were found in one of 
the combs, and young bees were already emerging from 
the cells, all of which were drones. As there were none 
but worker-cells in the hive, they were reared in them, 
and not having space for full development, they were 
dwarfed in size, although the bees had pieced the cells to 
give more room to their occupants. 
I was not only surprised to find drones reared in worker- 
cells, but equally so that a young queen, who at first lays 
only the eggs of workers, should be laying drone-eggs, 
