ARTIFICIAL SWARMING. 179 



He says, " you must examine the hive, and view what hon- 

 ey-combs it has ; then afterwards from the wax which con- 

 tains the seeds of the young bees, you must cut away that 

 part wherein the offspring of the royal brood is animated : 

 for this is easy to be seen ; because at the very end of the 

 wax-works there appears, as it were, a thimble-like process 

 (somewhat similar to an acorn,) rising higher, and having a 

 wider cavity, than the rest of the holes, wherein the young 

 bees of vulgar note are contained." 



Hyginus, who flourished before Columella had evidently 

 noticed the royal jelly ; for he speaks of cells larger than 

 those of the common bees, " filled as it were with a solid 

 substance of a red color, out of which the winged king is 

 at first formed." This ancient observer must undoubtedly 

 Iiave seen the quince-like jelly, a portion of which is always 

 found at the base of the royal cells, after the queens have 

 emerged. The ancients generally called the queen a king, 

 although Aristotle says that some in his time called her the 

 mother. Swammerdam was the first to prove by dissection 

 that the queen is a perfect female, and the only one in the 

 hive, and that the drone is the male. 



For reasons which I shall shortly mention, the ancient 

 methods of artificial increase appear to have met with but 

 small success. Towards the close of the last century, a 

 new impulse was given to the artificial production of 

 swarms, by the discovery of Schirach, a German clergy- 

 man, that bees are able to rear a queen from worker- 

 brood. For want, however, of a more thorough knowl- 

 edge of some important principles in the economy of the 

 bee, these efforts met with slender encouragement. 



Huber, after his splendid discoveries in the physiology of 

 the bee, perceived at once, the importance of multiplying 

 colonies by some method more reliable than that of natural 



