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We have seen that the workers, when free for the moment from the threatening fecundity of the queen, hasten to erect cells for provisions, whose construction is more economical and capacity greater.  We have seen, too, that the queen prefers to lay in the smaller cells, for which she is incessantly clamouring.  When these are wanting, however, or till they be provided, she resigns herself to laying her eggs in the large cells she finds on her road.

These eggs, though absolutely identical with those from which workers are hatched, will give birth to males, or drones.  Now, conversely to what takes place when a worker is turned into queen, it is here neither the form nor the capacity of the cell that produces this change; for from an egg laid in a large cell and afterwards transferred to that of a worker (a most difficult operation, because of the microscopic minuteness and extreme fragility of the egg, but one that I have four or five times successfully accomplished) there will issue an undeniable male, though more or less atrophied.  It follows, therefore, that the queen must possess the power, while laying, of knowing or determining the sex of the egg, and of adapting it to the cell over which she is bending.  She will rarely make a mistake.  How does she contrive, from among the myriad eggs her ovaries contain, to separate male from female, and lower them, at will, into the unique oviduct?

Here, yet again, there confronts us an enigma of the hive; and in this case one of the most unfathomable.  We know that the virgin queen is not sterile; but the eggs that she lays will produce only males.  It is not till after the impregnation of the nuptial flight that she can produce workers or drones at will.  The nuptial flight places her permanently in possession, till death, of the spermatozoa torn from her unfortunate lover.  These spermatozoa, whose number Dr. Leuckart estimates at twenty-five millions, are preserved alive in a special gland known as the spermatheca, that is situate under the ovaries, at the entrance to the common oviduct.  It is imagined that the narrow aperture of the smaller cells, and the manner in which the form of this aperture compels the queen to bend forward, exercise a certain pressure upon the spermatheca, in consequence of which the spermatozoa spring forth and fecundate the egg as it passes.  In the large cells this pressure would not take place, and the spermatheca would therefore not open.  Others, again, believe that the queen has perfect control over the muscles that open and close the spermatheca on the vagina; and these muscles are certainly very numerous, complex, and powerful.  For myself, I incline to the second of these hypotheses, though I do not for a moment pretend to decide which is the more correct; for indeed, the further we go and the more closely we study, the more plainly is it brought home to us that we merely are waifs shipwrecked on the ocean of nature; and ever and anon, from a sudden