Apart from this tragic element of sororicide, quickly over and soon forgotten in the general rejoicing, there is true romance in the early life-story of the Queen of the Bees—bridehood, wifehood, widowhood, following hard upon each other, all in the space of a single hour. But in the details of her common everyday life that succeed this tense period, above all in the wonderful structure of her body and its functions, there is greater romance still. That she has but a single commerce with the drone, and thereafter is exalted to perpetual fecundity; that, through her, sons and daughters can be given to the hive in just the proportion needed for the good of the State, or that increase of population can be wholly arrested at will, are facts to be accredited only after sure knowledge. And to understand how these results are brought about, it is necessary to learn something of the anatomy, as well as the manner of fecundation, of the mother-bee. In the first place, as fertilisation of the one sex by the other is usually regarded, the queen-bee is not fertilised at all. The vital essence of the drone does not penetrate the ovaries of the queen, but passes immediately after coition into a receptacle specially provided for it, where it is stored, and its effectiveness preserved, during nearly the whole lifetime of the queen. It has been shown that the virgin queen is able to lay eggs from which only drones, or male bees, originate. The fecundated queen, however, can lay both male and female eggs, and she has the power of depositing either kind when and wherever she wills. The whole thing, amazing as it is, and far-reaching in its results, has, like many other extraordinary devices in nature, a simple explanation. The gland wherein is stored the male life-essence, can be opened or closed at the will of the mother-bee, or rather, as will be shown, according to circumstances that for the moment involuntarily but inexorably guide her. When she is brought to the large drone-cell, this gland remains shut, and the egg escapes without contact with its contents. But at the narrow worker-cells the gland in the oviduct is opened, and the egg, in passing, absorbs some of its containing germs. Thus only the female bee is born of the union of the two parents; the male bee is the offspring of mother alone.