QUEENS. 



36.5 



QUEENS. 



er the queen has been out and fertilized, 

 her appearance is much the same as before. 

 She runs and hides when the hive is opened, 

 and looks so small and insignificant tliat 

 one would not think of calling her a fer- 

 tile queen. A few hours before the first egg 

 is laid, however, her body increases remark- 

 ably in size, and, if an Italian, becomes 

 lighter in color; and, instead of running 

 about as before, she walks slowly and se- 

 dately, and seems to have given up all her 

 youthful freaks, and come down to the so- 

 ber business of life in supplying the cells 

 with eggs. 



HOW OLD A QUEEN MAY BE AND STILL BE- 

 COME FERTILIZED. 



As we have said before, our queens usually 

 begin to lay when 8 or 10 days old, on the 

 average; but during a dearth of pasturage, 

 or when drones are scarce, they may fail to 

 lay until three weeks old. The longest pe- 

 riod we have ever known to elapse between 

 the birth of a queen and her laying worker- 

 eggs, was 25 days. We would destroy all 

 queens that do not lay at the age of 20 days, 

 when the season, flow of honey, flight of 

 drones, etc., are all right. There is one 

 important exception to this. Many times 

 queens will not lay in the fall at all, un- 

 less a flow of honey is produced either by 

 natural or artificial means. Queens intro- 

 duced in the fall often will not lay at all 

 until the ensuing spring, unless the colony 

 is fed -regularly every day for a week or ten 

 days. Also young queens that are fertilized 

 late in the season will often show no in- 

 dications of being fertilized until the col- 

 ony is fed as we have indicated. A lot of 

 young queens tliat we thought miglit be fer- 

 tilized but did not lay, were once wintered 

 over, just to try the experiment; and although 

 they went into winter quarters looking very 

 small, like virgin queens, they nearly all 

 proved fine layers in the spring. 



DRONE-LAYING QUEENS. 



If a queen is not fertilized in two weeks 

 from the time she hatches, she will often 

 commence laying without being fertilized at 

 all. She is then what we call a drone-laying 

 queen. Usually her eggs are not deposited 

 in the regular order of a fertile queen, 

 neither me there as many of them ; but by 

 these marks we are able only to guess that 

 she may not be all right, and so keep her 

 until some of the brood is capped, when the 

 extra height of the cappings, as we have ex- 

 plained under Drones, will tell the story. 

 At times, however, the eggs are deposited so 



regularly that we are deceived, and the (lueeii 

 may be sold for a fertile queen, when she is 

 only a worthless drone-layer; but this we 

 always discover after the brood is capped, 

 and send our customer another queen. Such 

 a case occurs, perhaps, once in a thousand. 

 Whether these drone-layers are just as good 

 to furnish supplies of drones for the apiary 

 as the drones reared from a fertile queen, is 

 a point, we believe, not fully decided; but if 

 you care for an opinion, we should say if the 

 queen lays the eggs in drone comb, and the 

 drones are large, fine, and healthy, we believe 

 them to be just as good. We should not want 

 to use drones reared from fertile workers, nor 

 drones reared in worker-cells, as those from 

 drone-laying queens sometimes are. 



SHALL WE CLIP QUEENS' WINGS ? 



The majority of honey-producers practice 

 what is known as clipping ; that is, two 

 wings on one side are cropped off, leaving 

 merely the stumps of what were once wings. 

 The object, of course, is to prevent swarms 

 from going off by making it impossible for 

 the queen to follow. 



As soon as a swarm issues, it will gen- 

 erally circle about in the air for a few 

 minutes, until, discovering the absence of 

 the queen, it will return to the old hive, 

 where it will find her, probably, hopping 

 about near the entrance. If the apiarist 

 happens to be on hand he changes hives 

 while the bees are in the air, and when they 

 return they enter their new quarters with 

 the queen. See Swarming. Where he is not 

 present, nor any one else to take care of 

 them, no harm is done, for the bees with 

 the queen simply go back. 



If one does not practice clipping he is quite 

 sure to be bothered with swarms clustering 

 in difticult and inaccessible places, and 

 going off, to say nothing of the general an- 

 noyance to neighbors and to himself in re- 

 covering and finally bringing back the ab- 

 sconders. 



Some, instead of clipping, prefer to use en- 

 trance-guards or Alley traps (see Dronbs), 

 which prevent all possibility of any valuable 

 queens getting lost in the grass, and save 

 the marring of her symmetrical appearance. 

 But outside of any sentimental reason, if we 

 may call it such, the use of entrance-guards 

 often saves an hour or two of hunting for 

 the queen (for the purpose of clipping), es- 

 pecially if the bees are black or hybrid, or 

 the colony is very populous. It takes but a 

 moment to put on the entrance-guards, 

 while it may, perhaps, on an average take 



