290 
BEES AND BEE-KEEPING, 
larva were removed in the usual manner, and the 
larva surrounded by a royal cell. Mr. Doolittle is 
an observer who deserves respect, but my expe- 
rience has , not furnished me with any exactly parallel 
instance. Such a queen would be an interesting 
subject for dissection, for I should expect her to be 
neither worker nor queen, but a little of both. Re- 
turning to our point. Should the bees of a deprived 
stock but start one queen from an advanced larva, 
she, because she first hatches, will alone survive if 
no queen-cells are removed, and so the practice of 
securing a new queen by the simple displacement 
of the old one is, although very convenient, not the 
very best (see page 265), and would, probably, if per- 
sisted in for many generations, deteriorate consider- 
ably the strain of bees subjected to its influence. 
We have now before us the general principles by which 
to be guided in raising queens of the highest excel- 
lence, and in the forefront stand these two : First, the 
larvae should be intended by the nurses for a queen 
from the very beginning ; and, second, the nurses 
must be numerous, and well nourished, and not have 
put upon their secretive powers a drain which they 
cannot fully bear. The conditions under which normal 
queens are produced at the epoch of natural swarm- 
ing especially emphasise this second point. Food is 
then so abundant, that the old mother is beginning 
to be crowded in her brood-nest; and as a conse- 
quence, while young bees are daily more numerous, the 
amount of nurse-work demanded is rather declining. 
Under these circumstances, the heavy but then easily- 
sustained burden of queen-raising is naturally under- 
i 
