THE ITALIAN HONEY-BEE. 541 



are often productive of great annoyance and misclaief in Italianizing an apiary, 

 as their progeny sometimes far outnumber the pur*; Italian drones then living. 

 The young queens, matured during their existence, are likely to be impregnated 

 by them. They are the more obnoxious from the fact that, where their progeny 

 is nearly pure, the mischief they create may not be discovered in the first gen- 

 eration, and its consequences may become so widely spread in the apiary as to 

 require great watchfulness and careful pruning, for a considerable time, to eradi- 

 cate it. Inasmuch as they can seldom be distinguished by their appearance 

 from the ordinary worker, and are rarely to be caught in the act of laying, it is 

 next to impossible to discover and remove them but by furnishing the nucleus 

 with a fertile queen, or uniting it to a colony which has such an one. The lay- 

 ing generally ceases. Whether or not they are then destroyed I have not yet 

 been able to discover. But to return to our young queens. Occasionally some 

 of those which are not destroyed, and come to maturity, are found to be defect- 

 ive, generally, in the wings, sometimes having only one, or none at all. As 

 queens copulate with the drones only on the wing and in the air, all such de- 

 fective queens are of course worthless, except as "drone-layers," and, unless 

 wanted as such, should at once be removed, and their places supplied by other 

 sealed queens, or eggs, for the purpose of rearing them. The young queens, 

 which mature perfect if favored with warm and fair weather, and drones are 

 abundant, generally leave their hives to copulate with the drone on the seventh 

 day after they are hatched, and on the following day, if impregnated, they com- 

 mence laying. 



From the period of hatching to that of impregnation, which, in favorable 

 weather, is generally from seven to fourteen days, many young queens are lost, 

 or perish from various causes, a few of which it may be well to enumerate. 

 They may be caught by the bee martin ; become exhausted, fall to the ground, 

 become chilled, or, from exhaustion, be unable again to rise ; their wings being 

 short, sometimes when she flies out the workers follow her, as in swarming, and 

 all desert their home together; at others they attempt to enter another hive, and 

 are stung to death by its inmates. Occasionally, when all return to their own 

 domicile, the workers, as if displeased with the procedure, seize their queen, 

 and, forming themselves into a knot, squeeze her to death. I am by no means 

 confident that this afi'ectionate embrace springs from maternal afiTection; still 

 they might sting her to death in a moment, while I have known them to be en- 

 gaged in this hugging process for three successive days together, and the queeu 

 still living, while in other eases they will continue to hug her carcass for several 

 hours after life has become extinct. As soon as they discover her decease they 

 drag her to the entrance and cast her out of the hive. 



After impregnation has taken place, and she has safely returned to her hive, 

 losses are comparatively few, unless the nucleus hive or colony be too small to 

 satisfy her prolific demands, when she will disencumber herself of eggs by de- 

 positing them on the edges, or in large numbers in the cells, and then desert 

 and seek a wider field for her operations by entering, or attempting to enter, 

 another hive, in which effort she generally perishes. At other times, in such 

 small nucleus hives, the population becomes too dense for comfort, and they 

 "swarm." Usually, however, in such cases, as in starving, it is rather a 

 'desertion than swarming, as no queen cells or workers remain behind. I 

 have found it very convenient and safe to use a small hive made on the 

 Langstroth movable comb principle, large enough to accommodate three or 

 four combs of full size. When they become too densely populated I divide 

 them, or rob them of brood before hatched, in order to prevent it. Where they 

 chance to become too weak I furnish them brood from other hives ; so also with 

 honey, thus keeping them in proper condition for my purposes. Where persons 

 are Italianizing their own apiaries only, and would have no further use for small 

 or nucleus hives afterward, they may either partition off a "Langstroth" hive 



