No. 6. DEPARTMENT OP AGRICULTURE. 685 



mine at once what kind of brood any hive contains. Twenty-one 

 days from the time the egg is laid the young worker-bee emerges 

 from its cell, having gone through some wonderful transformations 

 during the time it was sealed up, this stage being known as the pupa 

 stage. For drones the time is twenty-four days. 



About the time the drones begin to appear, the inmates of the 

 hive begin to prepare for swarming, which to any one watching 

 the habits of bees, is one of the most interesting things that takes 

 place in the colony. 



The workers now begin to make queen-cells. In our previous de- 

 scription of the development of the young from the egg, nothing 

 was said about the queen, and there are some decided differences 

 in her growth which we will now take up. 



As was stated earlier, the queen and the workers are all females. 

 Schirach, an old authority on bees, discovered that the bees can 

 take a young worker larva soon after it hatches from the egg, and, 

 by giving it special food, royal jelly, all during its larval life, and, 

 by constructing for it a special cell, make of the otherwise worker 

 larva a fully developed queen. This it is that the workers of a 

 colony do when they are preparing to swarm. Several young worker 

 larvae are chosen as the material for queen-rearing, generally lo- 

 cated near the margin of the comb. The workers now begin to 

 feed these chosen larvae an extra amount of food, and at the same 

 time the sides of the cells containing them are remodeled and en- 

 larged by the destruction of surrounding cells. The queen (or royal) 

 cell is nearly horizontal at the top, like the other cells of the comb, 

 and projects beyond them; later the workers construct another por- 

 tion of the cell into which the queen larva moves. This is an acorn- 

 shaped cell placed vertically on the comb, about as large as three 

 ordinary cells. As the cell is being built the queen larva continues 

 to grow until the time comes for her to be sealed up and enter the 

 pupa state. Although it takes the worker twenty-one days to com- 

 plete its development, the queen passes through all the stages and 

 reaches a considerably larger size in but sixteen days. 



Before leaving the subject of the raising of queens, o it might be 

 well to state that if, for some reason, a queen is killed in the hive, or 

 by chance gets lost, the workers can at any time replace her by the 

 same method, provided, of course, they have worker larvae on which 

 to work. In the same way they will replace or supersede an old 

 queen when she begins to show signs of decreased power of egg- 

 laying, so that this peculiar performance is not characteristic of 

 swarming only. 



In the swarming season, at about the time the new queens are 

 ready to leave their cells, the old queen leaves the hive and takes 

 with her a part of the workers, this being known as "swarming." 

 This generally takes place in the morning of a warm pleasant day. 

 It may as well be confessed that we know very little about this re- 

 markable instinct of the bee. In the first place, under ordinary 

 conditions, the old queen would not allow queen-cells to be con- 

 structed in her colony, nor has any one told us why she allows it 

 now Neither do we know what starts the actual swarming, nor 

 whicn bees, workers or queen, first set the hive in motion. We are 

 equally ignorant of what is the thing which compels certain bees 

 to leave with the old queen and why the others stay in the old hive 



