THE QUEEN BEE. 35 



grafting purposes than the one produced during the swarming 

 season. The inmate of an emergency cell as a rule has advanced 

 too far towards worker development. 



An emergency cell may produce a fairly good-looking queen, 

 but her ovaries and other reproductive organs during her worker 

 period of progress, have been greatly checked, and her laying 

 capacity of worker eggs greatly limited or wholly destroyed. Eggs 

 in queen cups are not superior to those in worker-cells ; as far as 

 eggs go they are one and the same. -But when once that in the 

 worker-cells has reached the limit of maternal development and 

 turns the corner towards perfecting a working-bee, its utility for 

 a queen ceases. It needs no argument to prove the superiority of 

 queens started in normal queen-cells from the egg or before turn- 

 ing the corner workerwards over those raised in emergency cells. 

 Promotion from worker larvae to that of queen larva should take 

 place as early as possible after the hatching of the egg. 



The chief and only aim of a beekeeper should be the pro- 

 duction of honey. Amateur beekeepers, as a rule, lose sight of 

 this. With them the multiplication of colonies is the one thing 

 needful. Of making many swarms there is no end. The increase of 

 colonies is a mania with far too many ; too rapid an increase of 

 colonies always ends in a failure of honey storage. Notwith- 

 standing there may be an abundant honey flow, and 1 while a near 

 neighbour is extracting honey and glorying in his success, another 

 will vote beekeeping a failure, because the object of the latter has 

 been to increase his bee crop at the expense of that of honey. 



This autumn, as I was passing through Orange, I was inform- 

 ed of a beekeeper with twenty-six colonies of bees who had har- 

 vested 5 tons of honey from October to April. A few miles off I 

 met with two beekeepers who had conjointly eleven colonies ; both 

 rejoiced in their success of this multiplication in one season. They 

 vould have been delighted could they have shown a ton of honey 

 as a result of the summer's work; the fault was in the bees, 

 aided with a want of knowledge on the part of the beekeepers 

 The judicious selection of queens in the early spring would have 

 given a surprising honey-yield, and the monetary profit would have 

 appeared as a miracle. 



The emergency cells are always constructed over an egg or a 

 developing larva, generally the latter. In no case are they so 

 selected for the purpose of the queen bee depositing an egg therein. 

 The queen's cell is always the colour of the comb on which it is 

 constructed and that of the other combs surrounding it. The 



