WHEN TO EXPECT SWARMS. 
55 
movable comb hive, is to open it after it has given off a swarm, 
and he will never be able to find a hatched queen in the hive. 
The absence of eggs in the hive from four to fifteen days or 
more after the swarm has left, is evidence that there is no 
queen there to lay them. 
One man tells me he cropped the wing of a young queen 
when hiving a swarm. The next season the bees fenced this 
eropped-winged queen out with the swarm. He supposed 
they had some antipathy towards her, and he was provoked 
at his bees, that for five years in succession they forced out 
this eropped-winged queen with the top swarm. Another 
Virginia bee-keeper is sure he can convince me that it is not 
the old but a young queen that leaves with the swarm, by the 
fact that he cropped the wing of a queen that had dropped 
on the ground in swarming, and then put her with the 
swarm. The next season he watched this swarm closely, and 
the queen that came off with the first swarm was a young one 
with perfect wings. “How could I overthrow that argument?” 
I remarked, “that all queens die sometimo. The fact that his 
queen dropped on the ground last season was evidence that 
she was then old.” 
When a queen begins to manifest infirmness, the bees, to 
prevent the danger of her dying and leaving them without 
eggs or queen, start young ones and then destroy the old one. 
All queens die within from three to five years, or at most six, 
and new queens are reared. 
This Virginian’s cropped queen had died. They had 
reared another, and she, the eldest one, and the only one in 
the hive, came with the swarm. 
Last season I had an old queen obtained in Italy. She had 
one leg off, one wing off, and the foot off on another leg. 
Yet she hobbled around and laid eggs almost as freely as any 
queen I had, yet I could hardly prevent the bees from rear- 
ing a young one and killing her. 
Some feel sure it is the old queen leaves with the first 
swarms, as they have often noticed them so imperfect that 
they dropped down and could not fly. I can easily imagine 
how a decrepid old queen, burdened with thousands of eggs, 
„ would be equally as clumsy as the young unfertilized one. 
The Virginian to whom I have referred, also attempted to 
prove to me that bees live for several years, by the fact that 
a swarm of bees had been clustered where he oould not re- 
