Note E — LETTER I. ON THE IMPREGNATION OF THE QUEEN BEE.

It will afterwards appear that what we took for the generative fluid, was the male organs of generation, left by copulation in the body of the female. This discovery we owe to a circumstance that shall immediately be related. Perhaps I should avoid prolixity, by suppressing all my first observations on the impregnation of the queen, and by passing directly to the experiments that prove she carries away the genital organs; but in such observations which are both new and delicate, and where it is so easy to be deceived, I think service is done to the reader by a candid avowal of my errors. This is an additional proof to so many others, of the absolute necessity that an observer should repeat all his experiments a thousand times, to obtain the certainty of seeing facts as they really exist.