30 MANUAL OF APICULTURE. 
not undertaken until it has passed about two weeks in the care of 
brood. The worker then takes up also wax secretion, if honey is to be 
capped over or combs built, although old bees can and do to a certain 
extent engage in wax production. 
THE DRONE. 
Eggs lett unfertilized produce drones and require twenty-four days 
from the time they are deposited until the perfect insect appears. They 
are normally deposited in the larger-sized horizontal cells, and when 
the latter are sealed, the capping Is more convex as well as lighter-colored 
than that of worker brood, which is brown and nearly flat. 
The fact that drones develop from unfertilized eggs is to be noted as 
having an important practical bearing in connection with the intro- 
duction of new strains of a given race or of new races of bees into an 
apiary. From a single choice home-bred or imported mother, young 
queens of undoubted purity of blood may be reared for all of the colo- 
nies of the apiary, and since the mating of these young queens does 
not affect their drone progeny, thereafter only drones of the desired 
strain or race and pure in blood will be produced, rendering, therefore, 
the pure mating of future rearings fairly certain if other bees are not 
numerous within a mile or two. Eventually also all of the colonies 
will be changed to the new race and without admixture of impure 
blood, provided always that the young queens be reared from mothers 
of pure blood mated to drones of equal purity. 
=< ae 
