A YEAR AMONG THE BEES. 
71 
a young queen just hatched, and then the old queen is pretty 
sure to be destroyed. In this latter case I may remove the 
young queen and give them a laying one, or I may let the 
young queen remain. 
In ten days from the time the swarm issued— sometimes 
ten days from the time I “ put up the queen I put down 
the queen. If, by chance, a young queen is in the upper 
hive, I do not like to put her down until she commences lay- 
ing and her wing is clipped, for fear of her taking out a 
swarm. It seems a foolish operation for them to swarm 
when there is nothing in the hive from which a queen can 
be reared, but I have had it happen. The operation of put- 
ting down is very simple. I lift the hive off the top, place it 
on the ground, remove the supers, take the hive off 
the stand, place it on one side, put the hive contain- 
ing the queen on the stand, and replace the supers. At the 
time I put up the queen I changed the number-tag, so as to 
keep the number always on the hive containing the queen. 
You will see that this leaves the queen full chance to lay 
from the minute she is uncaged, and at the time of putting 
down there will be as much brood as if the queen had 
remained in her usual place. Most of the bees, of course, 
adhered to the lower hive when the queen was put up, but 
by the time she is put down quite a force has hatched out, 
and these have marked the upper hive as their location. Upon 
this being taken away, the bees, as they return from the 
field, will settle upon the cover, where their hive was, and 
form a cluster there-; finally an explorer will crawl down to 
the entrance of the hive below, and a line of march in that 
direction will be established immediately. In a day or two 
they will go straight to the proper entrance. 
We left, standing on the ground, the hive with its two 
combs, which had been taken from the stand. These two 
combs, when the queen was put up, probably had a good 
quantity of eggs, and brood in all stages. They now contain 
none but sealed brood, some queen-cells and a pretty heavy 
supply of pollen. Or, it may be that eggs from an imported 
