196 The Relation of Apiculture to Science. [March, 
entific. The successful apiarist of to-day must be able to inspect 
every part of his hives; must be constantly familiar with the 
precise condition of every colony of his bees ; must be possessed 
of quick and accurate powers of observation. Thus we understand 
why science has gleaned so much from practical apiculture. 
The nature of the several bees in each colony, as to sex, func- 
tion and longevity, is now well known to every intelligent apiarist. 
The peculiar characteristics of queen, drones, and workers, and 
the peculiar duties of workers of different ages, are matters of 
daily observation. 
The queen is seen to lay three or four eggs per minute, and the 
apiarist, by adding comb with empty cells, proves that she may 
lay as many as 4000 eggs per day. Aristotle was correct, then, in 
calling the queen the mother, and Virgil wrong in pronouncing 
her to be the king. Her hatred of rivals is easily shown by the 
certain combat, fatal to one of them, when two queens are placed 
together. This enmity induces swarming, as bees rarely suffer a 
plurality of queens in the same hive. In swarming the queen 
never leads, yet the special place of clustering is usually deter- 
mined hy the queen. Unless the queen accompanies the swarm, 
the latter will always return to the hive. 
By clipping one wing of a virgin queen, so that flight will ever 
after be impossible, the bee-keeper quickly proves the correctness 
of the great Huber’s discovery, that queens always mate on the 
wing. The same experiment proves the correctness of Dzierzon’s 
more wonderful discovery, that drone bees are a result of agamic 
reproduction. No queen whose wing is clipped while yet a virgin, 
so far as I have observed, and I have tried the experiment many 
times, will ever lay eggs that will produce other than drone bees. 
It is also true that if a queen is forced to virginity for three or 
four weeks, she will always remain a virgin. 
Upon the queen’s return from her mating flight, we may ob- 
serve the evidence of success, as she always if successful bears 
away a portion of the drone’s reproductive organs, which remain 
attached to the queen for some hours. 
It was a theory of the late Samuel Wagner, that the placing of 
unimpregnated eggs in the larger cells of the drone comb, and 
the impregnated ones, in the smaller worker cells, was simply auto- 
matic. The pressure from the smaller cell upon the queen’s 
abdomen, forced the sperm cells from the spermatheca, as the 
