THE I1IVE AND HONEY-BEE. 
324 
11 1. That the Italian bees are less sensitive to cold than the 
common kind. 2. That their queens are more prolific. 3. That 
the colonies swarm earlier and more frequently, though of this he 
has less experience Ilian Dzierzon. 4. That they are less apt tc 
s.ing. Not only are they less apt, but scarcely are they hiclined 
to sting, though they will do so if intentionally annoyed or irri¬ 
tated. 5. That they are more industrious. Of this fact he had 
but one Summer’s experience, but all the results and indications 
go to confirm Dzierzon’s statements, and satisfy him of the 
superiority of this kind in every point of view. 6. That they are 
more disposed to rob than common bees, and more courageous and 
active in self-defence. They strive on all hands to force their 
way into colonies of common bees; but when strange bees attack 
their hives, they fight with great fierceness, and with an incredible 
adroitness.* 
‘‘From one Italian queen sent him by Dzierzon, Berlepsch suc¬ 
ceeded in obtaining, in the ensuing season, one hundred and thirty- 
nine fertile young queens, of which number about fifty produced 
pure Italian progeny f 
,! Busch [Die Honig-bicne , Gotha, 1855) describes the Italian 
bee as follows: ‘ The workers are smooth and glossy, and the 
color of their abdominal rings is a medium between the pale 
yellow of straw and the deeper yellow of ochre. These rings have 
a narrow black edge or border, so that the yellow (which might 
* Spinola speaks of these bees as “ velociores moUt ”—quicker in their motions 
than the common bees. 
+ “ It is a remarkable fact that an Italian queen, impregnated by a common drone 
and a common queen impregnated by an Italian drone, do not produce workers 
of a uniform intermediate cast, or hybrids; but some of the workers bred from 
the eggs of each queen will be purely of the Italian, and others as purely of the 
common race, only a few of them, indeed, being apparently hybrids. Berlepsch 
also had several bastardized queens, which at first produced Italian workers exclu¬ 
sively, and afterwards common workers as exclusively. Some such queens pro¬ 
duced fully three-fourths Italian workers; others, common workers in the same 
proportion. Nay, he states that he had one beautiful orange-yellow bastardized 
Italian queen which did not produce a single Italian worker, but only common 
workers, perhaps a shade lighter in color. The drones , however, produced by a 
bastardized Italian queen are uniformly of the Italian race, and this fact, besides 
demonstrating the truth of Dzierzon’s theory, renders the preservation and per¬ 
petuation of the Italian race, in its purifcv, ontircly feasible in any country where 
they may bo •ntroduced.”—S. Waonkh. 
