PROPOSED CAPTURE OP THE QUEEN. 227 



doubt exists, but he will see one or two queens come out, 

 when he may take one of them a prisoner, and the object 

 which he has in view is then obtained. This is a most saga- 

 cious recommendation on the part of Mr. Ducarne, but it is 

 of equal validity as the recommendation to the boy to 

 catch the birds by putting salt on their tails. A person may 

 watch the departure of a swarm a hundred times before he 

 will be able to catch a glimpse of the queen ; and then her 

 motions are so excessively rapid, that it must be under a 

 combination of very extraordinary circumstances indeed, 

 that she can be taken a prisoner : indeed Mr. Ducarne was in 

 some respects aware of this difficulty, for he recommends the 

 person, on his failure to entrap a queen bee on leaving the 

 hive, to follow the swarm, and as soon as it has settled, to 

 commence an examination of the bees, and the queen will be 

 discovered, when she can very quietly be taken possession of, 

 and conveyed to the expectant community in another hive. 

 This is indeed verifying the old adage of robbing Peter to 

 pay Paul; for, on the well grounded supposition that only one 

 queen departs with the swarm, and which may be considered 

 as an established fact, if all the bees cluster in one place, 

 what advantage has been gained by depriving a swarm of 

 its legitimate monarch, and thereby effecting its ruin, for 

 the mere purpose of bestowing her upon another community, 

 less valuable perhaps, and certainly less numerous than that 

 from which she has been taken? We must also enter our 

 protest against the probability of catching the queen at all, 

 whilst the bees remain in the clustered state. Seldom did 

 we ever see a queen, as Ducarne represents it, walking on 

 the outside of a swarm ; she is most generally in the very 

 kernel of the cluster, and to attempt to catch her in that 

 state would be a task, which the greatest enthusiast would 

 very soon be glad to relinquish. 



We consider it useless to pursue this subject any further. 

 The formation of artificial swarms is exploded from the 

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