ARTIFICIAL SWARMING. 183 



may have had a young queen almost mature, so that the 

 process of building large combs would be of short conlin- 

 uanoe ; for as soon as the young queen begins to lay, the 

 bees at once commence building combs adapted to the re- 

 ception of worker eggs. In some of my attempts to rear 

 artificial swarms by moving a full stock, as described above, 

 I have had combs built of enormous size, nearly four inches 

 through ! and these monster combs have afterwards been 

 pieced out on their lower edge, with worker cells for the 

 accommodation of the young queen ! So uniformly do the 

 bees with an unhatched queen, build in the way described, 

 that I can often tell at a single glance, by seeing what kind 

 of comb they are building, that a hive is queenless, or that 

 having been so, they have now a fertile young queen. 

 When a new colony is formed, by dividing the old hive, the 

 queenless part has thousands of cells filled with brood and 

 eggs, and young bees will be hourly hatching, for at least 

 three weeks : and by this time, the young queen will be 

 laying eggs, so that there will be an interval of not more 

 than three weeks, during which no accessions will be made 

 to the numbers of the colony. But when a new swarm is 

 formed by moving, not an egg will be deposited for nearly 

 three weeks ; and not a bee will be hatched for nearly six 

 weeks ; and during all this time, the colony will rapidly de- 

 crease, until by the time that the progeny of the young queen 

 begins to emerge from their cells, the number of bees in the 

 new hive will be so small, that it would be of no value, 

 even if its combs were of the best construction. 



Every observing bee-keeper must have noticed how rap- 

 idly even a powerful swarm diminishes in number, for the 

 first three weeks after it has been hived. In many cases, 

 before the young begin to hatch, it does not contain one half 

 its origmal number ; so very great is the mortality of bees 

 during the height of the working season. 



