rtilization? Do not the
two sexes both call for the assistance of the fertilizing element? If
there be one undoubted truth, it is certainly that. We are, it is true,
told very curious things about the Hive-bee. I will not discuss them:
this Bee stands too far outside the ordinary limits; and then the facts
asserted are far from being accepted by everybody. But the non-social
Bees and the predatory insects have nothing special about their laying.
Then why should they escape the common rule, which requires that every
living creature, male as well as female, should come from a fertilized
ovule? In its most solemn act, that of procreation, life is one and
uniform; what it does here it does there and there and everywhere. What!
The sporule of a scrap of moss requires an antherozoid before it is
fit to germinate; and the ovule of a Scolia, that proud huntress, can
dispense with the equivalent in order to hatch and produce a male? These
new-fangled theories seem to me to have very little value.

One might also bring forward the case of the Three-pronged Osmia, who
distributes the two sexes without any order in the hollow of her reed.
What singular whim is the mother obeying when, without decisive motive,
she opens her seminal phial at haphazard to anoint a female egg, or
else keeps it closed, also at haphazard, to allow a male egg to pass
unfertilized? I could imagine impregnation being given or withheld
for periods of some duration; but I cannot understand impregnation and
non-impregnation following upon each other anyhow, in any sort of order,
or rather with no order it all. The mother has just fertilized an egg.
Why should she refuse to fertilize the next, when neither the provisions
nor the lodgings differ in the smallest respect from the previous
provisions and lodgings? These capricious alternations, so unreasonable
and so exceedingly erratic, are scarcely appropriate to an act of such
importance.

But I promised not to argue and I find myself arguing. My reasoning is
too fine for dull wits. I will pass on and come to the brutal fact, the
real sledge-hammer blow.

Towards the end of the Bee's operations, in the first week of June, the
last acts of the Three-horned Osmia become so exceptionally interesting
that I made her the object of redoubled observation. The swarm at this
time is greatly reduced in numbers. I have still some thirty laggards,
who continue very busy, though their work is in vain. I see some very
cons