QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 71 



settling. It is possible that this erratic behaviour is the 

 result of the commencement of a disassociation of the units 

 that go to make up the swarming impulse. 



" Stingless " bees, in the sense that they do not insert 

 their stings into human beings, are common in Asia, and 

 there seems to be no reason why they should not be accli- 

 matised in Britain or in any other bee-keeping country. 

 When investigating the bees of India, in 1897, I paid a visit 

 to the apiary of native bees kept at the gaol at Darjeeling 

 (altitude 7,000 feet), in the Eastern Himalayas. These bees 

 were always handled without the use of either smoke or 

 veil. I myself examined a hive in this way, and I handled 

 the bees roughly to see if it was possible to get them to 

 sting, but it was not. An angry swarm gathered around 

 mv hat and head, and after I had left the hive twenty or 

 thirty bees followed me where^■er I went, but I gradually 

 got rid of them by dodging behind bushes. 



It would seem that stinging, which is really an act of 

 defence, depends upon two characters, which may be in- 

 herited separately, (i) the flying to the molester and (2) the 

 insertion of the sting into him. In our Western bees both 

 of these characters are present, the former one in a modified 

 degree. The Himalaya bees possess only the first. They 

 only threaten to sting. But in honey-gathering they are 

 probably much inferior to the European races. 



In conclusion, I would again draw attention to the value 

 of the bee produced in the first generation of a cross between 

 two distinct breeds. When a bee-keeper introduces a new 

 race or breed into his apiary he has two, not one, new bees 

 to study, the pure breed and the half-breed, and in addition 

 the host of varieties that follow in the second and later 

 generations. The generality of bee-keepers do not sufficiently 

 distinguish between pure breds and half-breds. The term 

 "Italian," for instance, is often applied indiscriminately 

 to the young of an imported Italian queen, and the young 

 of her daughters, reared and mated in Britain, and even 

 sometimes to the later generations — in fact, to any bee that 

 shows yellow bands. In this way many observations that 

 have been made about Italians have failed to be of value, 

 and have even been in conflict, one bee-keeper blaming them 



