The YOtfHCt NATURALIST: 



A Monthly Magazine of Natural History. 



Part 92. AUGUST, 1887. Vol. 8. 



THE A B C OF BEEKEEPING— AS A HOBBY 

 OR FOR PROFIT. 



By ROBERT J. BENNETT, Vice-President, Clydesdale Naturalists' Society. 

 Read at a meeting of the Clydesdale Naturalists' Society. 



THE lioney-bee has been a wonder to man and held in admiration by many 

 observers in all ages. Several remarkable passages in Holy Writ show 

 that honey was then held in higher esteem than in these degenerate days 

 when sugar or saccharine matter is obtained from cane, beet-root or even 

 coal-tar. 



QUEENS. 



In summer, as is generally known, a hive contains the Queen or mother- 

 bee, the Drone or male bee, and the Worker or neuter bee. The queen is 

 by far the most important personage in the hive, because she is reality the 

 the mother of all the bees it contains, and when we consider that during the 

 height of the season she deposits from two to three thousand eggs on an 

 average in twenty-four hours, we get some idea of the enormous labour she 

 undergoes, and her instinctive desire to retain supreme rule over her empire. 

 If you deprive a hive of the queen the bees at once set to work and raise 

 another, and this they are capable of doing so long as they have eggs or 

 worker larvse in the hive with which to do it. The queen is reared from the 

 egg or grub of what would have been an ordinary worker, had not the bees 

 (who have this power) selected the grub or larva before it attains the fourth 

 day as after this date the opportunity seems to have passed away. When 

 they select an egg or larva for transformation, they gnaw away the adjoining 

 cells until the base of the royal cell is equal to about three ordinary ones, 

 when they elongate it till it becomes almost like an acorn in shape, they 



