230 [Senate 



It is believed that the young bees (larva;,) must have new pollen, di- 

 rect from the fields, and honey from the sack of the nurse, in order 

 to insure vigor and health to the young. It is a common observation 

 that the apiary has been on the decline for two or three years, through 

 most of the New-England and northern states. The season of 1842j 

 has been more disastrous to the apiary than appears on record since 

 the settlement of New-Englandj very few swarms have come forth; 

 very few stocks have raised young bees in suflacient numbers to keep 

 up the animal heat necessary to prevent their freezing in cold wea- 

 ther, and very few swarms have honey enough to sustain them through 

 the coming winter. In short, the " naturalist" has been defeated 

 on almost every point, and compelled to seek new channels to dis- 

 cover the cause of his failures. I discovered quite early in the sea- 

 son, that my stocks did not increase in numbers as usual; whereupon 

 I examined many flowers with the aid of the microscope, during the 

 season, and found very little farina or honey; sometimes none of ei- 

 ther; occasionally both were abundant, but these turns were exceed- 

 ingly short; at the close of each, the habits of the bees would change 

 (as it seemed,) from the vigor of youth to extreme decrepid old age. 

 Here is an inexplicable fact; crops of grain have been abundant all 

 over the territory referred to. Has the effluvia that has been exhaled 

 irom the farina or pollen, in such small quantities, exerted the sexual 

 influence, so as to produce such an abundant yield? This is a ques- 

 tion for philosophers. But I must return to the experiment on the 

 hive, which greatly aids in confirmation of the fact that the queen 

 leads out the colony in swarming, but the bees lead after the swarm 

 is out of the hive. I have seen her majesty playing upon the bottom 

 board at the hive's mouth, running out and in a full quarter of an 

 hour before she would take the wing; then swarming came off regu- 

 lar; but she is usually among the last that alight. In several instances 

 I have had suspicions that the queen had not alighted with the swarm, 

 and have looked her up, and placed her with her faiuily before they 

 had returned to the parent stock. The queen is inclined to conceal 

 herself from human observation, extremely timid, and more jealous 

 than any of the bees. In this experiment the queen was suspended 

 on one side of the hive against the glass; the bees by accident clus- 

 tered in a body on the opposite side of the hive; after some twenty 

 or thirty minutes had elapsed, I discovered that the bees were dis- 

 posed to leave the interior of the hive, and cluster upon its outside. 

 On opening the door it w^as found that only two bees had found their 

 sovereign. I immediately brushed all the bees into the hive, and 

 confined them therein, with the expectation that when the bees found 

 their mistress was not with them, nor any probability of her coming, 

 they would grow restless and would run around the hive to find their 

 way out, and would come across their sovereign. They did so, and- 

 in the course of an hour I found her whole colony clustered around her. 

 Now, as I had most scrupulously observed all the facts in the fore- 

 going case for thirty days, and observed the inactivity and perfect 

 idleness of the bees after their dead queen was extracted from the 



