68 FORTY YEARS AMONG THE BEES. 



one wing' will not mar her looks so much, but when a 

 queen is scurrying across a comb, or when you get just 

 a glimpse of her in the hive, it is much easier to tell at 

 a glance that she is clipped if both wings on one side 

 are cut off. 



ADVANTAGE OF CLIPPING. 



Although nowadays the practice of clipping has be- 

 come quite general, there are a few who doubt its ad- 

 visability. I would not like to dispense with clipping if I 

 kept only one apiary and were on hand all the time, 

 and with out-apiaries and no one to watch them it seems 

 a necessity. If a colony swarms with a clipped queen, 

 it cannot go off. True, the queen may possibly be lost, 

 but it is better to lose the queen than to lose both bees 

 and queen. 



If there were no other reason for it, I should want 

 my queens clipped for the sake of keeping a proper record 

 of them. A colony, for example, distinguishes itself by 

 storing more than any other colony. I want to 

 breed next spring from the queen of that colony. 

 But she may be superseded in the fall after that big 

 harvest, and if she is not clipped there is no way fOr me 

 to tell in the following season whether she has been 

 superseded or not. Indeed I can hardly see how it is 

 possible to keep proper track of a queen without having 

 her clipped. 



Sometimes when a queen is being found, she will 

 quickly run under and out of the way, giving one a mere 

 glimpse of her, so that it is not easy to say whether it was 

 a queen or a worker that was seen, in which case the 

 missing wings aid in recognizing her. To this, how- 

 ever, it may be replied that there is less need to find 

 queens where they are not kept clipped. 



