BEARING QUEENS. 
87 
a pure Italian queen, which, if not abundant, the comb con- 
taining them may he cut into strips three-fourths of an inch in 
width, by about six inches in length, and this strip inserted 
into a frame of comb, the strip resting horizontally upon bear- 
ings of half an inch at its ends, with an open space cut out 
between these bearings, and under the strip containing the 
eggs, an inch in breadth. The bees will generally so distrib- 
ute the queen’s cells along the length, and at the lower edge 
of the strip of comb containing the eggs, as to admit of their 
being separated without much loss. The comb containing 
the eggs should hang between two others containing a suffi- 
ciency of honey and pollen to amply supply their wants. 
These combs, however, should contain no eggs or grub young 
enough to be convertible into queens ; otherwise the bees may 
select these native or impure eggs or grubs for queens, and 
rear the pure Italian eggs as workers only. This is the 
more important from the fact that they sometimes transfer 
eggs and grub from one cell to another, or from a worker to 
a queen cell. They may therefore take an impure egg or 
grub, and by placing it in a cell constructed upon the comb 
containing the pure Italian eggs, lead the breeder to suppose 
it pure ; and should it be nearly so, and produce a progeny 
not easily distinguishable from the pure race, it may be the 
means of introducing impurity into the apiary, which, failing 
soon to discover, they may be so .extensively disseminated, 
through it as to require much timo, care, labor, and loss to 
eradicate it. 
The bees will generally construct upon such a strip of 
comb from one to ten or twelve queen cells, frequently by 
enlarging worker cells, and extending them, thus enlarged, 
vertically downward in the space made vacant under the strip. 
The queen cells vary in length from three-eighths of an inch 
to one and three-eighths inch, and resemble small teats, much 
in the shape and form of a small peanut shell. Each shell 
contains a single queen; and as soon as the first of them is 
hatched she proceeds to destroy all the others by tearing open, 
or inciting the workers to tear open, their cells, when she will 
sting them to death, and the workers drag them out of the 
hive. As the first maturing queen may be hatched on the 
ninth or tenth day after the eggs and grub have been given 
to the nucleus to rear them from, it becomes necessary, in 
order to save all but the first hatohed from destruction, on the 
