226 NATURAL SWARMING. 
SECONDARY OR AFTER-SWARMS. 
444. Having described the method commonly pursued 
for hiving a new swarm, we return to the parent-colony from 
which they emigrated. 
From the immense number which have abandoned it, we 
should naturally infer that it must be nearly depopulated. To 
those who limited the fertility of the queen to four hundred 
eggs a day, the rapid replenishing of a hive, after swarm- 
ing, must have been inexplicable; but to those who have 
seen her lay from one to four thousand eggs a day, it is no 
mystery at all (40). Enough bees remain to carry on the 
domestic operations of the hive; and as the old queen de- 
parts only when there is a teeming population, and when 
thousands of young are daily hatching, and tens of thou- 
sands rapidly maturing, the hive, in a short time, is almost as 
populous as it was before swarming. 
Those who suppose that the new colony consists wholly 
of young bees, forced to emigrate by the older ones, if they 
closely examine a new swarm, will find that while some 
have the ragged wings of age, others are so young as to be 
barely able to fly. 
After the tumult of swarming is over, not a bee that did 
not participate in it, attempts to join the new colony, and 
not one that did, seeks to return. What determines some 
to go, and others to stay, we have no certain means of 
knowing. How wonderful must be the impression made 
upon an insect, to cause it in a few minutes so completely 
to lose its strong affection for the old home, that when 
established in a hive only a few feet distant, it pays not the 
slightest attention to its former abode! 
445. It has already been stated that, if the weather is 
favorable, the old queen usually leaves near the time that 
the young queens are sealed over to be changed into 
