310 SHIPPING AND TRANSPORTING BEES. 
weeks before, had left those immense bottom lands covered 
with a luxuriant vegetation. The result fully answered our 
anticipations. Those lately starving colonies, yielded a boun- 
tiful surplus, while their sisters on the hills had to be fed for 
Winter. But the labor of transportation, the risk incurred, 
if the colonies are strong and heavy, and the difficulty of 
transporting old bee-hives, without danger of some bees 
escaping, make the habitual shipping of bees for pasturage 
hardly advisable. 
SHIPPING QUEENS. 
594. It was in the numerous and partially successful 
attempts, which we made before 1874, to import bees from 
Italy, that we became acquainted with the conditions neces- 
sary to the shipping of queens. 
595. When they are to be confined a long time, the 
question of food is the most important. Many were the 
blunders made by the first shippers, who imagined that 
they required a large amount of food, and literally drowned 
them in honey. By repeated and costly experiments, we 
ascertained that the bees that arrived in the best condition 
were those that were fed on the purest saccharine matter. 
Those that suffered the most, were those that had the most 
watery (249), or the darkest, honey (627). Water (271), 
which some Italian shippers persisted in giving them, in 
spite of what we could say, was noxious; as the consump- 
tion of it, with the food, helped to load their abdomen with 
matter that could not be discharged (73), causing what is 
improperly called dysentery (784). Water is needed only 
in brood rearing. 
596. Old bees, or rather, bees that have begun to work 
in the field, will stand a longer trip than young bees, as the 
latter consume more honey, and need to discharge their 
abdomen oftener. 
