III. Discoveries on the sex of bees, explaining the manner in which their species is propagated; with an account of the utility that may be derived from those discoveries by the actual application of them to practice

The republic of bees has at all times gained universal esteem and admiration: their culture, an object so worthy of our attention, has attracted and still does engage that of many of the learned, and has arrived at a considerable degree of improvement of late years; but their mode of propagating their species seems to this day to have baffled the ingenuity of ages in their attempts to discover it. The most skillful naturalists have been strangely misled in their opinion, that the bees, as well as the other tribes of animals, are perpetuated by copulation; though they acknowledge that they have never been able to detect them in the act.