704 
QUEENS 
her a fertile queen. A few hours before 
the first egg is laid, however, her body in¬ 
creases remarkably in size, and, if an Ital¬ 
ian, becomes lighter in color, and, instead 
of running about as before, she walks slow¬ 
ly and sedately. She seems to have given 
up all her youthful freaks, and comes 
down to the sober business of life in sup¬ 
plying the cells with eggs. 
HOW OLD A QUEEN MAY BE AND STILL 
BECOME FERTILIZED. 
As before stated, queens usually begin 
to lay when 8 or 10 days old, on the 
average; but during a spell of bad weather, 
or when drones are scarce, they may fail to 
lay until three weeks old. The longest pe¬ 
riod we have ever known to elapse between 
the birth of a queen and her laying worker- 
eggs is about 25 days. All queens that do 
not lay at the age of *20 days should be de¬ 
stroyed, when the season, flow of honey, 
and flight of drones are right. There is one 
important exception to this. Many times 
queens will not lay in the fall at all, unless 
a flow of honey is produced either by nat¬ 
ural or artificial means. Queens introduced 
in the fall often will not lay until the ensu¬ 
ing spring, unless the colony is fed regu¬ 
larly every day for a week or ten clays. 
Likewise young queens that are fertilized 
late in the season will often show no indi¬ 
cations of being fertilized until the follow¬ 
ing spring. 
DRONE-LAYING QUEENS. 
If a queen is not fertilized in two weeks 
from the time she emerges, she will some¬ 
times commence laying without being ferti¬ 
lized at all. She is then what is called a 
drone-laying queen. Usually her eggs are 
not deposited in the regular order of a fer¬ 
tile queen, neither are there as many of 
them; by these marks one is able to guess 
that she may not be all right, and so watch 
her until some of the. brood is capped, 
when the extra height of the cappings, as 
is explained under Drones and Brood, 
shows. At times, however, the eggs are 
deposited so regularly that one is deceived, 
and the queen may be sold for a fertile 
queen, when she is only a worthless drone- 
layer; but this can be determined after the 
brood is capped. Such a case occurs, per¬ 
haps, once in a thousand. Whether these 
drones reared from drone-layers are just 
as good to furnish drones as those reared 
from a fertile queen, is a point not fully 
decided; but if the queen lays the eggs in 
drone comb, and the drones are large, fine, 
and healthy, they are probably all right. 
Drones reared from fertile workers, and 
drones reared in worker-cells, as those from 
drone-laying queens sometimes are, should 
not be used. 
How to find queens, see Manipulation 
of Colonies, subhead “How to Manipulate 
Hoffman Frames,” also “How to Handle 
Unspaced Frames.” 
SHALL QUEENS’ WINGS BE CLIPPED ? 
Many of the honey-producers prac¬ 
tice what is known as clipping; that is, 
both wings on one side are cropped off, 
leaving merely the, stumps of what were 
Willis queen-clipping device, and how used. 
once wings. The object, of course, is to 
prevent swarms from going off by making 
it impossible for the queen to follow. See 
Bee Behavior, also Swarming. 
There are very few who believe or pro¬ 
fess to believe that clipping is injurious to 
the queen. The fact that queens after be¬ 
ing clipped seem to do good service for two 
or three years, and sometimes four, and the 
