LOSS OF THE QUEEN. 261 
sion, while his joy-quickened steps proclaim that he feels that 
there is no place like the cheerful home where his chosen 
wife and companion presides as its happy and honored 
Queen.* If your home is not full of dear delights, try all 
the virtue of winning words and smiles, and the cheerful 
discharge of household duties, and exhaust the utmost pos- 
sible efficacy of love, and faith, and prayer, before those 
words of fearful agony, 
“ Anywhere, anywhere 
Out of the world!” 
are extorted from your despairing lips, as you realize that 
there is no home for you, until you have passed into that 
habitation not fashioned by human hands, or inhabited by 
human hearts. 
509. The neglect of a colony to expel drones (192), 
when they are destroyed in other hives, is always a suspi- 
cious sign, and generally an indication either that it has no 
queen, or else a drone-laying one (134), or drone-laying 
workers (176). A colony, in these circumstances, will not 
even destroy the drones of other hives, which may come to 
it, until a healthy queen has been raised in the hive, and is 
fertilized (120), and laying worker-eggs. 
510. In opening a queenless hive, the plaintive hum of 
the bees (76), the listless and intermittent vibrating of 
their wings, and the total lack of eggs, or young worker 
brood, tell their condition. 
A comb, with hatching bees,t should be given to it from 
«<< The tenth and last species of women were made out of a bee; and happy 
{a the man who gets such a one for his wife. She is full of virtue and prudence, 
and is the best wife that Jupiter can bestow.’’—Svectaton, No. 209. 
+ That class of bee-keepers who suppose that all such operations are the 
“(new fangled’’ inventions of modern times, will be surprised to learn that Col- 
umella, 1800 years ago, recommended strengthening feeble colonies, by cuttuig 
out combs from stronger ones, containing workers ‘‘ just gnawing out of their 
cella.’? 
