86 SBUCCESSFUL BEE-KEEPING. 
successively destroying all queen cells for eight days, to 
introduce the Italian queen. It is found that the black 
bees will then accept her. And since the queen, once fer- © 
tile, continues so for life, her progeny which will begin to 
appear in twenty-one days after her introduction, will be- 
come the exclusive possessors of the hive in a period of 
from three to six months. 
So far the process is successful and perfect : but the 
theory has been, further, that inasmuch as the drone progeny 
of the queen was of necessity as pure as herself, whether 
she had met pure or impure drones, or, indeed, any drones 
at all, all we had to do to breed the Italian race in purity 
was, to get a pure queen, purely impregnated, and rear 
from her eggs a new race of queens for all our hives, when 
all our drones, being the offspring of pure Italian queens, 
would be pure Italians : then our queens, having been im- 
pregnated by black drones and hence producing hybrid 
workers, must be replaced with new ones reared from 
the original queen ; these new queens, meeting only pure 
drones, would irsure the perfect Italianization of the 
entire apiary. - 
All this is theoretically plain enough, and it is presumed 
that not one person in ten will anticipate any difficulty in 
effecting a change of the apiary from one race to the oth- 
er; whereas, not one in a thousand, probably, will be able 
to do this on the first trial, if, indeed, at all. Let us look 
at the practical difficulties in the way of accomplishing it. 
We will suppose that a pure Italian queen, purely im- 
pregnated, is obtained, and successfully transferred to a 
hive of common bees. After the lapse of twenty-four days, 
all progeny of the old queen will have disappeared from the 
combs. If we now exterminate the drones, we will insure 
Italian male bees in purity from the one hive only. But 
