TEMPERAMENTS 
93 
points of difference. One strain of Italians, for in¬ 
stance, are especially good honey-gatherers; another 
may be very quiet and not easily disturbed. Another 
strain of the same race may raise quantities of brood 
but gather very little honey. Such qualities are 
transmitted from the bees of one queen to her 
descendants. 
Furthermore, each individual colony of a strain is 
a unit. The whole colony of forty to seventy thou¬ 
sand bees share similar temperaments and habits 
and can be considered precisely as one individual. 
During my experience I have answered numerous 
calls to transfer bees from buildings or trees, and 
have seldom refused such an undertaking if the 
colony was in a reasonably accessible place. 
Among these experiences I reckon as memorable 
the taking of a very powerful and very vicious 
colony of black bees out from under the eaves above 
a wooden dormer window of a big summer 
boarding-house in Shirley, Massachusetts. The 
house, known locally as the “Old Brick Tavern,” 
is a fine old building; in earlier times well known 
as a road-house and described at length by William 
Dean Howells in his novel An Undiscovered 
Country . 
The bees had lived there for many years and were 
