vil OUEENS IN CONFINEMENT 135 
to rear her brood, although they were of a strange - 
species, and gave her no assistance. 
But the slow and laborious process of getting 
queens to start breeding in confinement, with the 
assistance of only two or three workers, greatly 
handicaps them, and it is improbable _ that 
queens so treated can ever become the mothers 
of very populous colonies. To give a queen 
caught in the fields the best possible start, she 
should be shut up and fed until she becomes broody, 
and then introduced into a de-queened nest of her 
own species, in which the first workers have only 
recently emerged. It does not do to wait until 
many workers have emerged, for then there is 
great risk of the queen getting killed, even after 
friendship has been established: by neglecting this 
particular I have lost several valuable queens. 
What proved to be my most populous colony 
of lapidarius during the season of 1910 resulted 
from putting two small clusters of cocoons and seven 
large young workers with a searching queen. The 
large family of workers that this queen produced 
was chiefly due to the fact that she was able to 
proceed at once, while she still possessed the energy 
of youth, to continuous egg-laying in a prosperous 
colony without the delays, and, more especially, the 
exhausting labour, of gathering food, that are the 
natural experiences of a queen. 
It ought not to be difficult to introduce a queen 
into the commencing nest of a strange species. We 
have seen how in nature Psz¢hyrus queens are 
