ITALIANIZING. 75 



sued, as will at once appear by an easy calculation. 

 After the capped queen-cells were put in the nuclei, 

 there would be an average of four days before they 

 would hatch ; then five days would pass before the 

 queen would go out to meet the drone, and longer, 

 if the fifth and some following days should chance 

 to be cloudy ; then two days more before the fertil- 

 ized queens would begin to lay ; making a period of 

 at least eleven days after the nuclei were made be- 

 fore the queens would begin to lay. If, instead of 

 making nuclei, I had destroyed all my black queens 

 and given the queen-cells directly to the black 

 stocks, each stock then would have been for at least 

 eleven days without a laying queen. A first-rate 

 queen will lay 3,000 eggs a day. We will suppose 

 that mine would have laid 2,500 a day. In one 

 hive for eleven days this would have been a loss of 

 27,500 bees. In the thirty-six hives, the aggregate 

 loss would have been 990,000 bees. I destroyed 

 twelve queens and made their stocks into nuclei, so 

 by my method I lost the use of twelve queens for 

 the eleven days, in all, a loss of 330,000 bees by the 

 nucleus method, against a loss of 990,000 by the 

 other method. This is a clear gain by the nucleus 

 method of 660,000 bees. This, too, was during the 

 time when bees must be raised to gather the white- 

 clover honey which comes soon after. A loss of so 

 many bees at this season would have seriously less- 



