64 
BEES AND BEE-KEEPING. 
Even the best of these plans is too troublesome to 
be to the taste of those whose aim is profit rather 
than amusement ; to such, the preventioji of after- 
swarms is the important point. Cutting* out all queen- 
cells save one has been given as a specific, deferring 
the operation until five or six days after swarming, 
so that no eggs or grubs capable of being converted 
into queens may remain. The queen-cell elect should 
be built on worker-comb, robust, long, and sym- 
metrically rounded at the end, like A, Fig. 43. The 
short cells, abruptly terminating, and sealed diagonally 
to their length, should always be destroyed, as they 
yield queens only partially differentiated from the 
worker, as I have anatomically proved (page 80, 
Vol. I.). But the process is not an absolutely certain 
preventive, since, very occasionally, the one queen 
resulting will come off, and leave the colony desti- 
tute. The cutting-out of queen-cells is, moreover, 
subject to misadventure. It is difficult to find all, 
and those passed by will usually be the small, ill- 
placed, and inferior ones, yielding those poor queens 
which, through our meddling, possibly get a chance 
of deteriorating our strain of bees. Sometimes, the 
one cell left does not hatch ; and, again, even the 
keen-sighted may leave, and depend upon (page 154) 
a cell that has already furnished a queen. 
It has previously been pointed out that it is wise to 
put the swarm on the stand of the parent colony, 
which is carried to a new position, and thus loses 
all its bees as yet old enough to fly. This greatly 
* A gash with a knife, certainly killing the lar\-a, is all that is needed. 
