OF MANAGING BEES. 83 



The queen's cell is never made except when a young 

 queen is wanted. Although, in frequent instances, there are 

 several of them made in a hive of bees in a season, yet but 

 one queen is ever raised in a cell. They are usually attached 

 to the side of the comb, of workers, by changing three 

 workers' cells into one, for a queen : they are made per- 

 fectly round, pointing downwards, and are always destroyed 

 by the bees, by being worked down to a mere knob, with a 

 hole about the size of a common gold bead, very soon after 

 the young queen has made her escape from her cell. But 

 this experiment illustrates another fact which ought here to 

 be mentioned ; and, in order to examine the comb with great 

 particularity, we devised means to exhaust the air in the 

 hive of a portion of its vitality, which caused the bees to 

 descend upon the bottom board, leaving but few among the 

 combs, which greatly facilitated a minute inspection of the 

 whole interior of the hive ; whereupon it was discovered that 

 the comb was unusually loaded with the pollen of flowers. 

 This clearly proves (as it agrees with other experiments 

 directed to the same point) that the pollen of flowers, or 

 bee-bread, is designed for the larvae only, and that perfect 

 bees never eat it ; hence it is easily seen why an old hive of 

 bees becomes so heavily laden with that article of food, a 

 superabundance of which is worse than useless to them, and 

 for ^fbich, we think we have discovered a remedy. 



Another fact, of some importance to the bee--manager, 

 proved by this experiment, and corroborating other testi- 

 mony, is this ; notwithstanding the queen leads in swarming 

 out of the old stock, yet the bees usually assume the lead 

 after they are out of the hive, and the queen is usually 

 among those who alight la". It is true, indeed, that the 

 tees will return to the parent hive, unless their sovereign is 

 heard in the air. We haye known many swarnis to alight, 



