wing, and that the influence of this lasts for several years, and
probably for life. He could not form any satisfactory conjecture, as to
the way in which the eggs which were not yet developed in her ovaries,
could be fertilized. Years ago, the celebrated Dr. John Hunter, and
others, supposed that there must be a permanent receptacle for the male
sperm, opening into the passage for the eggs called the oviduct.
Dzierzon, who must be regarded as one of the ablest contributors of
modern times, to Apiarian science, maintains this opinion, and states
that he has found such a receptacle filled with a fluid, resembling the
semen of the drones. He nowhere, to my knowledge, states that he ever
made microscopic examinations, so as to put the matter on the footing of
demonstration.

In January and February of 1852, I submitted several Queen Bees to Dr.
Joseph Leidy of Philadelphia, for a scientific examination. I need
hardly say to any Naturalist in this country, that Dr. Leidy has
obtained the very highest reputation, both at home and abroad, as a
skillful naturalist and microscopic anatomist. No man in this country or
Europe, was more competent to make the investigations that I desired. He
found in making his dissections, a small globular sac, not larger than a
grain of mustard seed, (about 1/33 of an inch in diameter,)
communicating with the oviduct, and filled with a whitish fluid, which
when examined under the microscope, was found to abound in spermatozoa,
or the animalculae, which are the unmistakable characteristics of the
seminal fluid. Later in the season, the same substance was compared with
some taken from the drones, and found to be exactly similar to it.

These examinations have settled, on the impregnable basis of
demonstration, the mode in which the eggs of the Queen are vivified. In
descending the oviduct to be deposited in the cells, they pass by the
mouth of this seminal sac or spermatheca, and receive a portion of its
fertilizing contents. Small as it is, its contents are sufficient to
impregnate hundreds of thousands of eggs. In precisely the same way,
the mother wasps and hornets are fecundated. The females alone of these
insects survive the winter, and they begin, single-handed, the
construction of a nest, in which, at first, only a few eggs are
deposited. How could these eggs hatch, if the females which laid them,
had not been impregnated, the previous season? Dissection proves them to
have a spermatheca