Texas Beekeeping. 27 



crawls over the combs and eats honey. She diminishes somewhat in 

 size and becomes darker in color in a few days until she is hardly 

 larger than a worker-bee, but very active, and at this time these vir- 

 gin queens are very hard to find. About the seventh day she leaves 

 the hive for her "wedding flight," to become mated to a drone, 

 which always takes place in the open air while both queen and drone 

 are on the wing. After copulation the drone dies instantly upon sep- 

 aration, as the male organs are torn from his body by the queen when 

 she returns to the hive, and may be plainly seen by the apiarist if he 

 be near. After the seminal fluid is absorbed from the organs, which 

 dry up and disappear, the virgin queen is fertilized, never needing 

 to become mated again, and she now is a fertile queen and becomes a 

 laying queen, beginning to lay in two or three days after mating. She 

 now obtains her full siae, resumes her bright color and assumes a 

 majestic appearance, so that she is easily distinguished from amongst 

 the rest of the bees. 



If a virgin queen fails to mate she may become a worthless "drone 

 layer," laying only unfertilized eggs from which nothing but drones 

 hatch. Sometimes the young queen may 

 fail to return from her wedding flight, 

 being either caught by some bird, or en- 

 tering a wrong hive where she is killed by 

 the inmates, leaving her own colony hope- 

 lessly queenless as there are no eggs or 

 young larvae from which another may be 

 reared. For this reason a careful exam- 

 ination should be made of such colonies 

 and, if the new queen does not begin to 

 lay in due time, a comb containing eggs 

 or very young larvae from which to rear 

 another, should be supplied, or, better still, 

 a queen-cell almost ready to hatch, or a Queen, or^other bee. 

 laying queen. 



Beginning laying only a few eggs a day, soon after fertilization, 

 or at the beginning of the season, the number laid by a queen increases 

 daily until the height of the season, the latter part of April or in May. 

 More than 2,000 eggs may be laid during a single day for a short time, 

 after which a gradual decrease takes place until the end of the laying 

 season, in the forepart of winter, is reached. 



Although the queen is provided with a sting she in no instance 

 uses it in stinging, except upon a rival queen. Therefore she may be 

 handled without fear but exceeding care should be taken not to injure 

 her by the pressure of the fingers upon the abdomen, or otherwise. 

 The safest way is to handle her by the wings or about the thorax. 



The average life of queens is about three years. They are at their 

 best during their first and second season. Many queens have been 

 known to live four to five years, but it is not advisable to keep very 

 old queens as their feebleness results in weak colonies, due to their 

 inability to keep up the required egg-laying, or in their becoming 

 drone-layers, owing to the exhaustion of the fertilizing fluid in their 

 bodies, received when mating. They are generally superseded by the 

 bees as soon as they begin to fail in their third or fourth year. At 



