, similar to that of the Queen Bee.

Of all who have written against Huber, no one has treated him with more
unfairness, misrepresentation, and I might almost add, malignity, than
Huish. He maintains that the eggs of the Queen are impregnated by the
drones, after she has deposited them in the cells, and accounts for the
fact that brood is produced in the Spring, long before the existence of
any drones in the hive, by asserting that these eggs were deposited and
impregnated late in the previous season, and have remained dormant, all
winter, in the hive: and yet the same writer, while ridiculing the
discoveries of Huber, advises that all the mother wasps should be killed
in the Spring, to prevent them from founding families to commit
depredations upon the bees! It never seems to have occurred to him, that
the existence of a permanently impregnated mother wasp, was just as
difficult to be accounted for, as the existence of a similarly
impregnated Queen Bee.

EFFECT OF RETARDED IMPREGNATION ON THE QUEEN BEE.

I shall now mention a fact in the physiology of the Queen Bee, more
singular than any which has yet been related.

Huber, while experimenting to ascertain how the Queen was fecundated,
confined some of his young Queens to their hives, by contracting the
entrances, so that they were not able to go in search of the drones,
until three weeks after their birth. To his amazement, these Queens
whose impregnation was thus unnaturally retarded, _never laid any eggs
but such as produced drones_!!

He tried the experiment again and again, but always with the same
result. Some Bee-Keepers, long before his time, had observed that all
the brood in a hive were occasionally drones, and of course, that such
colonies rapidly went to ruin. Before attempting any explanation of this
astonishing fact, I must call the attention of the reader, to another of
the mysteries of the Bee-Hive,

FERTILE WORKERS.

It has already been remarked, that the workers are proved by dissection
to be females, all of which, under ordinary circumstances, are barren.
Occasionally, some of them appear to be more fully developed than
common, so as to be capable of laying eggs: these eggs, like those of
Queens whose impregnation has been retarded, _always produce drones_!
Sometimes, when a colony has lost its Queen, these drone-laying workers
are exalted to her place, and treated with equal respect and affection,
by the bees. Huber ascertained that thes