320 
tiie hive and honey-bee. 
parent-hive, when the first swarm and old queen left, were of ths 
Italian stock exclusively, few of this kind remained in the Fall, 
and none survived the Winter. 4. The young queen is impreg- 
nated soon alter she is established in a colony, and continues fer- 
tile during life. Were this not so, the genuine queens would not 
have continued to produce pure brood during those seven succes- 
sive years. 5. The queen leaves the hive to meet the drones. 
If not. it would scarcely have happened, that all the young queens 
bred in those seven years, with only one exception, were impreg- 
nated by common drones, and produced a bastard progeny. 6. Tho 
old queen regularly leaves with tho first swarm, or the genuine 
Italian brood would not invariably have been the product of the 
swarm, but occasionally, at least, ol the parent colony, which 
never happened in all that time. 
« These observations and inferences impelled Dzierzon — who 
had previously ascertained that the cells of the Italian and com- 
mon bees were of the same size — to make an effort to procure tho 
Italian bee; and, by the aid of the Austrian Agricultural Society 
at Vienna,* he succeeded in obtaining, late in February, 1853, a 
colony from Mira, near Venice. On the following day, he trans- 
ferred the combs and bees into one of his own hives, and, when 
the season opened, placed the hive on a stand in his Apiary, and 
screwed it fast, that it might not be stolen. He never moved it 
during the ensuing Summer, but took from it combs with worker 
and drone-brood, at regular intervals, supplying their place with 
empty comb. In this w'ay, he succeeded in rearing nearly filty 
young queens, about one-half of which were impregnated by Italian 
drones, and produced genuine brood. The other half produced a 
bastard progeny. He continued thus to multiply queens by tho 
removal of brood, till the parent-stock, and several of his artificial 
colonies, suddenly killed off their drones, on the 25th of June. 
The bees of the original colony still labored very assiduously, but 
* Some of tho Governments of Europe have recently taken great interest in <lls- 
eeminating among their pooplo a knowledge of Dzlerzon's system of Bee-Culture. 
Prussia furnishes annually a numhor of persons from different parts of the King- 
dom, with the means of acquiring a practical knowledge of tills system ; wh e 1 10 
Bavarian Government hao prescribed instruction in Dzlorzon’s theory am puci « “ 
of boe-culturo, as a part of tho regular course of studies in its teachers’ Seminar tea 
