repeat, however, that there was not the least
variation in the principle, and that whenever the copulation of queens
was postponed beyond the twenty-first day, the eggs of males only were
produced. Therefore, I shall limit my narrative to those experiments
that have taught me some remarkable facts.

A queen being hatched on the fourth of October 1789, we put her into a
leaf-hive. Though the season was well advanced, a considerable number of
males was still in the hive; and it here became important to learn,
whether, at this period of the year, they could equally effect
fecundation; also, in case it succeeded, whether a laying, begun in the
middle of autumn, would be interrupted or continued during winter. Thus,
we allowed the queen to leave the hive. She departed, indeed, but made
four and twenty fruitless attempts before returning with the evidence of
fecundation. Finally, on the thirty-first of October, she was more
fortunate: She departed, and returned with the most undoubted proof of
the success of her amours: She was now twenty-seven days old,
consequently fecundation had been retarded. She ought to have begun
laying within forty-six hours, but the weather was cold, and she did not
lay; which proves, as we may cursorily remark, that refrigeration of the
atmosphere is the principal agent that suspends the laying of queens
during winter. I was excessively impatient to learn whether, on the
return of spring, she would prove fertile, without a new copulation. The
means of ascertaining the fact was easy; for the entrances of the hives
only required contraction, so as to prevent her from escaping. She was
confined from the end of October until May. In the middle of March, we
visited the combs, and found a considerable number of eggs, but, none
being yet hatched, we could not know whether they would produce workers
or males. On the fourth of April, having again examined the state of the
hive, we found a prodigious quantity of nymphs and worms, all of
drones; nor had this queen laid a single worker's egg.

Here, as well as in the preceding experiment, retardation had rendered
the queens incapable of laying the eggs of workers. But this result is
the more remarkable, as the queen did not commence laying until four
months and a half after fecundation. It is not rigorously true,
therefore, that the term of forty-six hours elapses between the
copulation of the female and her laying; the interval may be much
longer, if the we