- Account of the Queen Bee. 5s 
bees pleafe, appears to me, from my own ex- 
periments, to be paft a doubt; and that a 
Queen, who never faw a drone, can lay eggs, 
which will produce bees, is equally certain. 
Both of thefe facts will, I flatter myfelf, appear 
to the curious and learned reader, to be clear- 
ly afcertained by the following experiments. 
Long before I heard of Mr Schirach’s theo- 
ry, or experiments, I had often taken off 
fwarms, without leaving any Queens or royal 
cells in the mother hive; notwithftanding 
which, they bred young Queens, which fur- 
prized me greatly how they had obtained them, 
as the received opinion then was, that they 
could not breed a Queen bee, if the old Queen 
was taken away, before a royal cell was eret- 
ed. But after feeing Schirach’s fentiments on 
this fubje€t, 1 thought his theory extremely 
probable, according to what I had obferved a- 
mong my own bees; and refolving to afcertain 
the truth of it, I made many experiments of 
my own, which all fucceeded to my withes. 
But, in order to put the matter beyond all 
doubt, I fhall relate an experiment I made with 
a hive in {pring 1788, two months before the 
ufual time of fwarming, and which clearly 
afcertains both the facts at once. The hive 
was 
