imetre (About one-fiftieth of an
inch.--Translator's Note.) in diameter, a globule headed amidst a tangle
of air-ducts and fatty patches, of which it shares the colour, a dull
white. Then again, the merest slip of the forceps is enough to destroy
it. My first investigations, therefore, which concerned the reproductive
apparatus as a whole, might very well have allowed it to pass
unperceived.

In order to know the rights of the matter once and for all, as the
anatomical treatises taught me nothing, I once more fixed my microscope
on its stand and rearranged my old dissecting-tank, an ordinary tumbler
with a cork disk covered with black satin. This time, not without a
certain strain on my eyes, which are already growing tired, I succeeded
in finding the said organ in the Bembex-wasps, the Halicti (Cf.
Chapters 12 to 14 of the present volume.--Translator's Note.), the
Carpenter-bees, the Bumble-bees, the Andrenae (A species of Burrowing
Bees.--Translator's Note.) and the Megachiles. (Or Leaf-cutting Bees.
Cf. Chapter 8 of the present volume.--Translator's Note.) I failed in
the case of the Osmiae, the Chalicodomae and the Anthophorae. Is the
organ really absent? Or was there want of skill on my part? I
lean towards want of skill and admit that all the game-hunting and
honey-gathering Hymenoptera possess a seminal receptacle, which can be
recognized by its contents, a quantity of spiral spermatozoids whirling
and twisting on the slide of the microscope.

This organ once accepted, the German theory becomes applicable to all
the Bees and all the Wasps. When copulating, the female receives the
seminal fluid and holds it stored in her receptacle. From that moment,
the two procreating elements are present in the mother at one and the
same time: the female element, the ovule; and the male element, the
spermatozoid. At the egg-layer's will, the receptacle bestows a tiny
drop of its contents upon the matured ovule, when it reaches
the oviduct, and you have a female egg; or else it withholds its
spermatozoids and you have an egg that remains male, as it was at first.
I readily admit it: the theory is very simple, lucid and seductive. But
is it correct? That is another question.

One might begin by reproaching it with making a singular exception to
one of the most general rules. Which of us, casting his eyes over the
whole zoological progression, would dare to assert that the egg is
originally male and that it becomes female by fe