RAISING AND INTRODUCTION OF QUEENS. 285 
soon cut off from the workers, and continued to the 
end of the chapter with the queen, while the drones 
receive a medium quantity. 
Reasoning from these premises, it would appear 
that the secretion diet has some curious power of 
developing and strengthening the reproductive faculty, 
which, in the worker, remains in abeyance, although, 
it is not absolutely absent. At the same time, we 
have brought before us two points — viz., first, the 
raising of drone-brood is far more expensive and 
exhausting to a colony than the raising of an equal 
breadth of workers ; and, second, that queen-feeding 
is not only exhausting, but not fully within the reach 
of little and weak lots, which are, consequently, unable 
to produce queens of the highest quality, of which we 
shall have further evidence if we examine the young 
worker larvae in colonies in dissimilar conditions, when 
we shall note a vast difference in the amount of food 
given to the babies. In swarms, e.g., the first hatched 
are fed so profusely that they look almost like the in- 
mates of queen-cells, because the workers are far in 
excess of the nursing that is to be done by them; while 
in poor colonies, with a considerable breadth of brood, 
or in those that have been over-swarmed, the larvae ap- 
pear dry and foodless, because their little throats carry 
down more than the nurses are easily able to prepare. 
As, from the foregoing, bees are able, by feeding, 
to convert any young worker larva, or egg which 
might produce such, into a queen, the bee-keeper has 
but to remove the mother from a stock, and supply, 
if needful, the eggs or young larvae, and the bees 
will do the rest. When they discover their queen- 
