The success of the investigation induced this accomplished young lady to extend her dissection to the common workers, which was crowned with a result equally gratifying. Parallel instances have been observed with regard to the humble-bee, the wasp and the ant, amongst which, those that have usually been called neuters are found to be females, and when fertile, they, like the fertile workers in a bee-hive, produce males universally. Having now traced these insects through their regular stages of egg, larva, nymph, until they become perfect bees, and having noticed the facts which show the working bees to be females, I shall advert to the more intricate and mysterious business of _Impregnation_. This is a subject which was long involved in obscurity, and which indeed is still clouded by some uncertainty. Schirach and Bonner stoutly denied the necessity of sexual intercourse between the queen and the drones, considering the former as a mother and yet a virgin, and Swammerdam was of the same opinion; he ascribes impregnation to a vivifying seminal aura, which is exhaled from the drones and penetrates the body of the queen. This opinion arose from his observing a very strong odour to be exhaled, at certain times, from the drones; "Hanc sententiam ratam habuit, quia organa apum propagini servientia, sexus utriusque, ritè dissecta, inter se ita disparia videbantur, ut congressus ne fieri quidem ullo pacto posset." His opinion with respect to the vivifying influence of the seminal aura also accounted satisfactorily, to his own mind, for there being such a prodigious number of drones, as, in proportion to their number, would of course be the intensity of their peculiar odour. Reaumur very successfully combated this fanciful doctrine, and Huber has confuted it by direct experiment. Reaumur inclined to the opinion that there was a sexual intercourse, though his experiments left that question undecided. Arthur Dobbs, Esq. has given it as his opinion that the queen's eggs were impregnated by coition with the drones, and that a renewal of the intercourse was unnecessary. He however thought that she had intercourse with several, instead of with one only, in order that there might be a sufficient deposition of sperm to impregnate all her eggs. About the beginning of the last century, Maraldi broached another hypothesis; he imagined that the eggs were fecundated by the drones, after the queen had deposited them in the cells, similarly to what takes place in the fecundation of fish-spawn. In 1777 that ingenious naturalist Mr. Debraw, who was apothecary to Addenbroke's Hospital at Cambridge, also adopted this opinion; and even so late as the year 1817 Huish has supported the same doctrine, and I believe does so at the present time. Debraw thought he had discovered the prolific fluid of the drones, in the brood-cells, which fertilizing the eggs caused them to produce larvæ. Huber repeated the experiments of Debraw, and at first