540 AGRICULTURAT. REPORT. 



reared from a pure Italian ogg, but impregnated by an impure or even native 

 drone, may be pure Italian, (which is now considered by Eiiropeans, as well 

 as many American breeders, as an established fact;) yet that is the only pure 

 progeny which a pure virgin queen thus impregnated is capable of producing ; 

 and that, should she die, and another queen be reared from her eggs resembling 

 the hybridized mother, without the knowledge of the breeder, though she should 

 be impregnated by a pure Italian drone, she would produce no pure progeny 

 whatever, though it might closely resemble it ; and, by the introduction of 

 such a queen into an apiary, incalculable mischief may and generally does 

 follow. 



The bees will generally construct upon such a strip of comb from one to ten 

 or twelve queen cells, frequently by enlarging worker cells, and extending 

 them, thus enlarged, vertically downward in the space made vacant under the 

 strip. The queen cells vary in length from three-eighths of an inch to one and 

 three- eighths inch, and resemble small teats, much in the shape and form of a 

 small peanut shell. Each shell contains a single queen, and as soon as the 

 first of them is hatched she proceeds to destroy all the others by tearing open, 

 or inciting the workers to tear open, their cells, when she will sting them to 

 death and the workers drag them out of the hive. As the first maturing queen 

 may be hatched on the ninth or tenth day after the eggs and gi-ub have been 

 given to the nucleus to rear them from, it becomes necessary, in order to save 

 all but the first hatched from destruction, on the ninth day, to provide a similar 

 queenless nucleus or miniature colony for the reception of each of the young 

 queens, and to cut out all except one of them, distributing them separately to 

 each nucleus by cutting an aperture in one of its combs, and fitting the queen 

 cell into it. Great care is required in performing this operation in order to 

 prevent the young queen from being injured or destroyed. Some of them will 

 at that time be found to have just changed into its pupae or chrysalis stage 

 of development, when they are so tender that a slight pressure, jar, or too long 

 exposure to the cool air, may destroy their vitality. Where these queen cells are 

 distributed to colonies which have but recently been deprived of their queens, 

 and still have eggs or grub young enough to be convertible into queens, they 

 not unfrequently destroy the transferred one, even to the third and fourth trial; 

 and in some instances I have had them to continue it when they had.no longer 

 any material for young queens left. In such cases they will sometimes re- 

 ceive a hatched or mature queen ; but in others they pertinaciously refuse to 

 receive any, but in that case will occasionally rear one or more from eggs 

 which may be furnished them immediately after those whichi they had have 

 from age ceased to be convertible into queens. In a few instances, however, 

 they will, for a time, refuse to receive or rear all and any queens. When this 

 is the case, it is best to break it up and unite it to another. These obstinate 

 and contrary nuclei are apt to become infested with ''fertile workers'' which, 

 while they resemble the ordinary worker bee, are capable of laying eggs which 

 produce drones only. In rearing queens the workers not unfrequently, after 

 feeding a number of the worker larvae for two or three days upon the royal 

 jelly, (upon which embyro queens are fed as if intending to convert them into 

 queens,) suddenly cease to supply a portion of them with it, and thenceforward 

 supply them with such food only as is used in the development of the ordinary 

 worker bee, completing their development as such. 



It has been supposed by Huber, and other distinguished apiarians, that the 

 royal food which they for a time enjoy produces the development requisite to 

 enable them to perform this queenly function. They are often very prolific, 

 laying thousands of eggs in drone and worker cells indiscriminately, sometimes 

 depositing a dozen or more in a single cell. They are generally bred more 

 abundantly at the season when colonies containing fertile queens have destroyed 

 their drones, and where they happen to be impure, or not of full Italian blood 



