T^^ AMERICAN 



t^ ^ ^^^ 



'4* "4* "4* 



Apiculturist. 



A. Journal Devoted, to Practical Beekeeping. 



VOL. IX. 



MAY, 1891. 



No. 5. 



DEVELOPMENT OF QUEENS. 



Before the convention of German and 

 Austrian beekeepers held in October, 

 1890, at Graz (Austria), Mr. W. Vogel 

 read an essay on this subject. 



I will mention and criticise some of 

 the points, which will no doubt interest 

 the readers of the Api. 



Vogel says : Bees ne^rr build queen 

 cells over a cell containing an egg. If 

 a colony receives a comb with eggs only 

 and no other brood, these eggs are 

 always removed by the bees during the 

 excitement caused by queenlessness. 

 The latter part is in accordance with 

 my experience, and friend Alley men- 

 tions this removing of eggs in his book 

 and gives the remedy for it. The ques- 

 tion is now, if we understand, to keep 

 the bees from removing the eggs. Will 

 they build queen-cells over these eggs 

 or will they wait till the larva is out of 

 the egg? I am not sure about it. In 

 rearing queens I always used eggs just 

 three days old or very young larv?e and 

 now I prefer the latter one. 



This removing of eggs brought up the 

 idea that the bees eat them. Can any 

 one prove this? I do not believe it. 



I sometimes doubt whether a queen 

 ever lays an egg in a queen-cell, and it 

 is believed that the worker bees transfer 

 these eggs into the cell-cups. This is a 

 mistake. It was more than once ob- 

 served by able apiarists, that a queen 

 laid an egg in a queen-cup, and all the 

 facts reported as yet, which seem to 

 prove that eggs were removed, can be 

 explained by fertile workers or in some 

 other way. I had observed many cases 



when queen-cells were started on combs, 

 which surely contained not a single egg 

 before ; but by continued observation I 

 found always that these capped cells con- 

 tained a dead drone. 



The sexual organs of the queen com- 

 mence to develop not before the sixth 

 day of the larval-state, but they are fully 

 developed in the nymph-state. We see 

 by this that in exceptional cases the 

 bees can raise a queen from a larva a 

 little more than five days old. We 

 believe that a larva four and one-half 

 days old, observed by Doolittle, was the 

 oldest ever used for a queen, but Mr. 

 Vogel says that he many times has tried 

 the matter. 



Further we hear that the bees always 

 select a larva about three days old from 

 which to raise queens, if larvse of every 

 age are in the hive. 



Vogel says, that the size of the cell 

 has no influence at all to the size of the 

 queen raised in it, so that from a small 

 cell a strong queen can issue. Every 

 queen-cell, even the smallest, is large 

 enough for the largest queen. The 

 cause of small queens is either too little 

 food or too low a temperature. Even 

 from a larva nearly six days old a nor- 

 mal sized queen can be reared in a very 

 small queen cell. 



If we take into consideration the size 

 of the queens .only, Mr Vogel may be 

 correct in some cases. But ij|p^ far as 

 my experience goes, I found out that a 

 small and very smooth cell always con- 

 tained a small queen. It is true, if this 

 queen is fertilized and laying eggs we 

 do not see very much difference ; but 



(Co) 



