CONTROLLED INCREASE. 
229 
which our apiary in the coming year shall have, 
as we fondly hope, larger possibilities than it has 
had in the past. The rest have been, perhaps, an 
all-round average — some better, some worse — but 
nothing especially remarkable. Our half-dozen stocks 
thus left to themselves, so far as increase is con- 
cerned, present us with an instructive type of a 
process which has been at work through the ages, 
amongst the honey bees, in a state of nature. 
Variations have constantly been occurring; but those 
bees which have been the largest hoarders of honey 
have been, on account of this characteristic — especially 
if it has been very marked — restricted in any effort to 
multiply the race by swarming. The queens of these, 
the most valuable stocks, have left no progeny, and 
the variation which (from the bee-keeper^s point of 
view, at least) is most worthy of perpetuation, and, if 
possible, of augmentation, has died with the queens 
which have given it origin. But not so with the 
persistent swarmers, which, in the nature of the case, 
amass less wealth : theirs it is to raise new queens, 
start new .colonies, and so strongly impress their own 
variations upon the bee-life of the future. It is true 
that reckless swarmers, rushing out to start new 
colonies at unfavourable seasons, do not naturally 
perpetuate their peculiarities, for they succumb in the 
struggle for existence ; but, after this abatement is 
fully made, the fact remains that natural selection 
unduly favours the swarming impulse, while it gives 
no encouragement to those variations which lead to a 
collection of honey considerably in excess of the 
needs of the colony gathering it. 
