224 THE BEE NATION. 



The artificial replacement of a dead or lost queen by 

 another or by a stranger is the more easily effected the 

 longer it happens after the loss, or the longer the bees have 

 had to forget their former ruler. This will happen in from 

 twenty-four to thirty hours. Huber gave a new queen to a 

 hive that had been queenless for four-and-twenty hours. 

 The bees nearest her touched her with their antennae, felt her 

 all over the body with their proboscides, offered her honey, 

 fluttered their wings and formed a circle round the ruler. 

 They then made room for others which acted in a similar 

 way, and so the circle enlarged continually. They then all 

 fluttered their wings and shook themselves without confusion 

 or noise, as though they had made a very delightful dis- 

 covery. When the queen set herself in motion, the circle 

 opened, formed a hedge, and escorted her. When she 

 arrived at the other side of the comb, where hitherto com- 

 plete quiet had prevailed, the same reception was repeated. 

 The workers busy at the royal cells stopped work, pulled out 

 the royal larvae, and then devoured the food stored up round 

 them ! From thenceforward the queen was recognised by all 

 the people, and behaved herself as though perfectly at home. 

 The bees, however, are exceedingly capricious creatures, 

 and will one day willingly accept an introduced queen, and 

 the next fall upon her with really diabolical fury, although 

 she had been given to them twenty-four or forty-eight 

 hours after their loss. In the attempt to introduce Italian 

 bees into Germany, the Freiherr of Berlepsch always found 

 that at least three queens out of four, in spite of the greatest 

 care and prudence, were stung, smothered, maimed, or chased 

 away, while in the succeeding summer his experience was 

 exactly the opposite. In any case it seems that a queenless 

 hive will receive willingly a strange queen only when the 

 feeling or consciousness of queenlessness and helplessness 

 has spread through the whole hive and is shared by each indi- 

 vidual bee. So long as this is not the case, it cannot be 

 surprising that a strange queen is treated and illused as such 

 by the majority of the bees. 



An interesting observation on this point is published by 

 the liev. George Kleine, of Luethorst, in his pamphlet on 

 Italian bees and beekeeping (Berlin, 1855): "In order to 

 give a German hive an Italian queen I take away," he says, 

 u a fully-stocked hive and put in its place one with empty 



