208 AUSTRALASIAN 



CHAPTER XII. 



QUEEN EEAEING. 



NECESSITY OF THE PRACTICE. 



In order to obtain good results from the apiary we must, as a 

 matter of course, have good bees and plenty of them ; and in 

 order to have good bees we must first of all have good queens 

 to breed from. That there is often a vast dissimilarity in the 

 characteristic qualities of different colonies in the same apiary, 

 no one who has had even a short experience will deny. How 

 often do we find the bees of some colonies constantly irritable 

 and disposed to sting, while those of others may be handled 

 with impunity ; or some giving a good return of honey, while 

 others are doing little or nothing. Such cases may be seen in 

 every apiary where a careful breeding of queens has not been 

 systematically carried out. That it is possible, on the other 

 hand, by means of such a system, to develop to a greater 

 extent the good qualities, and to breed out the bad ones in 

 the honey-bee, is no longer a matter of doubt. Such advanced 

 apiarists as Alley, Heddon, Doolittle, and others in America, 

 who have gone about the work in a conscientious as well as a 

 scientific manner, have undoubtedly succeeded in developing a 

 superior strain of bees. There is nothing to cause surprise in 

 all this, when we consider the analogous case of the results 

 obtained by select breeding of horses, cattle, and all our 

 domestic animals. The breeder of bees has one advantage as 

 compared with breeders of horses and cattle — he has not to 

 wait so long for the results of his experiments ; the bee- keeper 

 can do as much with his bees in the way of crossing and 

 improving races in from four to five years as the cattle breeder 

 could probably accomplish with his stock in twenty or thirty 

 years. Considering the many advantages to be gained by 

 cultivating the best qualities in our bees, I am induced to look 



