LOSS OF QUEENS. 
67 
or cell, it will be a great help. Some fear that by artificial di. 
visions there will not be the right proportion of honey-gath- 
erers, wax-workers ,and nurses left in the hive. I do not know 
that there is such a division of labor, each having its appro- 
priate work to perform. Any one can do all the parts, yet the 
young bees mainly do the nursing ; these are the ones mostly 
left in the hive when it has been moved to a new locality to 
let the bees fly back to the old stand. If the bees and honey 
be equally distributed, the hive that is queenless will construct 
drone combs, principally in the empty spaces in the hive, until 
their young queen becomes fertile. So much drone comb will 
make the hive an unprofitable one afterwards. The hive that 
has all the brood and honey of course does not need so many 
bees as the one that has neither. 
LOSS OF QUEENS. 
Loss of queens is a fruitful source of loss of colonies. For 
if they have not the means to produce another queen, they 
will inevitably dwindle to nothing. This is one means of 
testing the length of life of bees. When they have no queen 
capable of producing bees to supply the daily loss, it is rare^Jr 
the case that a colony will survive more than four months, 
except in winter ; hives in this condition labor with less assi- 
duity. Some say they will gather no bee-bread while they are 
queenless, as they need none for brood. This is not the case; 
although they will not gather so freely, and they defend them- 
selves less vigorously against worms and robbers. A queen 
may die at any time, but the four-fifths of the failures take 
place just after swarming, when the young queens fly out to 
meet the drones. That they do this has ceased to be a ques- 
tion among intelligent practical bee-men ; also, that one im- 
pregnation is effective for life. Queens generally fly out for 
this purpose about noon, or a little after, when they are a 
week old. Sometimes they are out a few minutes, at others 
an half hour or more. They sometimes mate with drones at. 
considerable distance from home. When there were no Ital- 
ian bees in this county, except close to Cadiz, I found a nnm- 
, ber of hives three or four miles from town that had queens 
which had been fertilized by Italian drones and produced a 
mixed progeny. However, when drones are numerous in an 
apiary, queens seldom have to be out long, or fly far to meet 
