DADANT SYSTEM OF BEEKEEPING 



The Queen 



The queen, the mother-bee, is fertiUzed for life, at the age 

 of about 6 to 10 days, in normal circumstances. She is then 

 fitted for a Hfe's production of bees. Her greatest laying comes 

 at the opening of spring, when it is necessary to rear, for the 

 honey harvest, a large number of worker-bees. Early writers 

 assured their readers that a 

 good queen could lay from 200 

 to 500 eggs per day, and they 

 perhaps wondered whether the 

 reader would believe this as- 

 sertion. But when the inven- 

 tion of movable-frame hives 

 enabled the beekeeper to 

 study the innermost secrets 

 of the bee-hive, it was found Fig.4. Headof the Queen (magnified) 

 that queens of good quality 



(and we should have no others) could lay more than 3,000 eggs 

 per day, for weeks and months together. This was cisserted 

 first by Langstroth and Quinby. Mr. Langstroth stated that 

 he had seen a queen lay, in an observing hive, at the rate of 

 six eggs per minute. We witnessed a similar performance 

 ourselves. It is not necessary that a queen should lay eggs at 

 that speed in order to prove very prolific, since a ten hour day 

 of egg-laying would produce 3600 eggs. 



Doolittle, one of the bright lights of beekeeping, from 1870 

 to 1918, asserted that he had had queens that laid as many as 

 5,000 eggs in 24 hours, for weeks in succession. There is a way 

 by which any one, who owns bees in movable-frame hives, may 

 ascertain how many eggs are laid by a prolific queen, without 

 being compelled to watch her performances. It takes 21 days to 

 carry the newly laid egg, intended for a worker-bee, through the 

 different stages of metamorphosis, to the perfect insect with 

 wings which cuts itself out of the sealed cell. So if we count the 

 number of cells containing brood and eggs, during the height of 

 the breeding season, if the hive be large enough and the queen 



