QUEENS. 



8.57 



QUEENS. 



NATURAL QTJEE"Nr-CELLS GREATLY ENLARGED. 



IMPERFECTLY DEVELOPED QUEENS. 



Some queens are small, unusually dark in 

 color, and sometimes become fertilized,which 

 lay eggs for a little while (from a week to 

 several months), but never prove profitable. 

 Sometimes they will not lay at all, but re- 

 main in a colony all through the season, 

 neither doing any good nor permitting any 

 other queen to be either introduced or 

 reared. A wingless queen, or one with bad 

 wings, will produce the same result. The 

 remedy is to hunt them out and remove 

 them. Where they are so nearly like a 

 worker-bee as to make it hard to distin- 

 guish them, they can often be detected by 

 the peculiar behavior of the bees toward 

 them. See Introducing Queens, also cut 

 on the previous page. In tlie fall, after the 

 queen has ceased laying, she will usually look 

 small and insignificant even thovigh she be 

 an extra good one. But if it is during the 

 laying season, when all fertile queens are 

 laying, and the queen looks small, she 

 sliould be removed, and anotlier put in lier 

 place. It doesn't pay to keep any thing but 

 the very best stock. Tlie loss in honey 

 would pay for several good queens. 



now A WORKER-EGG IS MADE TO PRODUCE 

 A QUEEN. 



This is a question often asked, and it is 

 one that puzzles us about as much to an- 

 swer as any question a visitor can ask. We 

 can not promise to tell you all about it, but 

 we will tell you all we know about it. 

 First get a frame of eggs, as we did in study- 

 ing Bees, but we will vary the experiment 

 by putting it into a colony having no queen. 

 The tiny eggs will hatch into larvae as 

 before; but about as soon as they begin 

 to hatch, if we look carefully we shall find 

 some of the cells supplied with a greater 

 profusion of milky food than others. Later, 

 these cells will begin to be enlarged, and 

 soon at the expense of the adjoining ones. 

 These are queen-cells, and they are some- 

 thing like the cup of an acorn in shape, and 

 usually occupy about the space of three ordi- 

 nary cells. In the drawing given, you will 

 see cells in different stages of groAvth. 



At A (see next page) is a cell being con- 

 verted into a queen-cell; at B, one where 

 the tliin walls are extended so as to form a 

 queen-cell proper, almost ready to seal up. 

 Tills occurs just about nine days from the 



