80 FIFTY YBAES AMONG THE BEES 



BEES BALLING QUEEN. 



When a colony is l)eing overhauled, it sometimes happens 

 that the queen is found balled. This balling is likely more be- 

 cause the colony, being frightened, is seeking to protect the 

 queen than because of any hostility to her. Pig. 30 shows a 

 queen thus balled, or rather the balling bees are shown, the 

 queen being hidden by them. The ball is small, whereas a ball 

 of bees bent on the destruction of a strange queen is liable to 

 be as large as a hickorynut, or larger. 



Whether the object of the bees be to protect the queen or 

 not, anything that tends to excite them sufficiently may lead 

 them to do violence to the queen. So when I find the queen 

 thus balled, I always close the hive immediately, not generally 

 touching it again till the next day, when everything will be 

 found all right. 



MAKING RECORDS. 



After the overhauling of a colony is completed, a record 

 thereof must be made. If May 10, 1902, should be the date of 

 the visit, and if I should clip the queen at that visit, I would 

 make the entry, "May 10 cl q (01)," which means that I clipped 

 ' the queen May 10, and that she was a queen reared in 1901. If, 

 later in the season, I should clip a queen reared that same 

 season, the entry would be "cl q (02)," meaning that the queen 

 was reared in 1902. In either case the year of the birth of the 

 old queen in the left-hand margin has a line drawn through it, 

 and the birth-year of the new queen is written under it. If I 

 find a clipped queen in the hive, then the entry is"q cl," which 

 means the queen was already clipped. It might not seem 

 important to enter that the queen was already clipped, but if 

 I do not find her the first or second time looking over the combs 

 T leave it till another day, leaving the blank after the date, and 

 that keeps me in mind of the fact that I have not yet seen the 

 queen. 



After clipping the wing of the queen I put her on the top 

 of a frame directly over the brood-nest. If you hold her on 

 your finger over the brood-nest she displays a great degree of 

 perverseness and persists in crawling up your hand, right away 



