"This explanation is thoroughly untenable; for--(_a_) perfectly new worker cells are fully as wide as very old drone cells in which breeding has taken place many times, and yet, as found by experience, female bees come from the former and males from the latter, (_b_) Many queens are of a strikingly slender form, some of them occasionally so small that they can scarcely be distinguished from workers, and yet they have no proclivity to drone-laying--which must however have been the case if the narrow cell effected the fertilisation of the egg by pressure.... (_c_) A queen lays even in cells that are scarcely begun, with which, therefore, the proportion of the diameter to the thickness of her body can exercise no influence at all, and yet drones come forth from the drone cells and workers from the worker cells. (_d_) If there are no drone cells at her command, and the stock is in want of drones, the queen lays male eggs in worker cells, and drones hatch from them.... (_i_) A fertile queen, if introduced with her colony into a hive containing nothing but drone comb, would naturally [on such hypothesis] furnish the drone cells with eggs as she would worker cells, and make no difficulty about it. But she does make a very great difficulty--for a long time she lays no eggs in the cells at all, but lets them drop, or tries to escape abroad with her entire colony. But at last she does lay in the drone cells, and what ensues? _Ordinary worker bees come forth._" Instances follow of experiments decisively proving this. It is only fair, however, to add that Mr. Wagner's theory does not necessarily degrade the monarch of the hive into "a mere egg-laying machine," as Von Berlepsch regards it in some of his arguments, for she might still exhibit intelligence in deciding which cells to lay in, even if the determination of the sex of the egg rested finally with the cell which she had chosen.