708 
QUEENS 
set up a .peculiar cry—that is to say, all 
thru the hive they will he buzzing as if in 
distress, and they surely are, because they 
have no queen. As soon as a hive of this 
kind is opened they will begin this cry of 
distress. Sometimes only a part of the 
bees will be involved, and at other times 
apparently every bee in the colony. This 
buzzing of the wings is so marked that the 
practiced beekeepe'er recognizes it as an in¬ 
dication that a colony may be queenless; 
and if he finds no eggs nor young brood at 
a time of the year when both should be 
present, he is quite sure that the hive lias 
no queen. If he finds queen-cells, all doubt 
will be removed. Sometimes a colony that 
is not queenless will set up a buzzing as if 
they were without a mother. It is then 
evident that the show of distress is not 
because they have no queen but because of 
the disturbance. Too much smoke, Tor ex¬ 
ample, with most colonies and a little smoke 
with some colonies will cause them to make 
this sign of distress. It must, therefore, be 
regarded as not an infallible sign of queen- 
lessness. Colonies that have been queenless 
for a long time will no longer indicate their 
condition in this manner. 
ODOR OF A LAYING QUEEN. 
After bees have been some time queen¬ 
less they usually become, if no laying 
workers make their appearance (see Lay¬ 
ing Workers), very eager for the presence 
of a queen; and in no way can this eager 
behavior be described, so well as to describe 
another way of testing a colony that is 
thought to be queenless. Take a cage or 
box containing a laying queen and hold 
either the cage or simply the cover of it 
over the bees, or hold it in such a way as 
# to let one corner touch the frames. If 
queenless, the first bees that catch the 
scent of the piece of wood on which the 
queen has been, will begin to move their 
wings in token of rejoicing, and soon near¬ 
ly the whole colony will be hanging to the 
cage or cover. When they behave in this 
manner there will seldom be any trouble 
in letting the queen out at once. Such cases 
are generally where a colony is found with¬ 
out brood in the spring. 
There is something very peculiar about 
the scent of a laying queen. After having 
had a queen on the fingers, bees will often 
follow and gather about the hand. They 
will often hover for hours about the spot 
where the queen has alighted for even an 
instant, and, sometimes, for a day or two 
afterward. Where clipped queens get down 
into the grass or weeds or crawl • sometimes 
a considerable distance from the hive, they 
may often be found by watching the bees 
that were crawling about along the path 
she had taken. When cages containing 
queens are being carried away bees will 
often come and alight on the cage, ma kin g 
that peculiar shaking of the wings which 
indicates their joy on finding the queen. 
queens’ stings. 
There is something rather strange in the 
fact that a queen very rarely uses her sting, 
even under the greatest provocation possi¬ 
ble, unless it is toward a rival queen. In 
fact, she may be pinched or pulled limb 
from limb, without even showing any symp¬ 
toms of protruding the sting at all; yet as 
soon as she is put in a cage or under a 
tumbler with another queen, the fatal sting 
is almost sure to be used at once. There 
seems to be a most wise provision in this; 
for if the queen used her sting on every 
provocation as does the worker, the pros¬ 
perity of the colony would be almost con¬ 
stantly endangered. 
It was just stated that a queen very 
rarely uses her sting; but it is the excep¬ 
tion that proves the rule. The following 
will explain: 
One very young virgin queen that stung 
me was well developed and later proved to 
be a good queen for business. The other 
virgin, also very young, that stung me was 
from a good-looking cell, and I suppose was 
all right. As it was so much easier to crush 
her than to endure her continued stinging 
till I could get her out of my clothing, she 
was killed without knowing positively what 
kind of a queen she would have proven her¬ 
self to be. • W. A. H. Gilstrap. 
Ceres, Calif. 
caution in regard to deciding a stock 
TO BE QUEENLESS. 
As a rule it may be said that absence of 
brood or eggs is a pretty sure indication of 
queenlessness; but it should be borne in 
mind that all colonies, as a rule, in the 
eastern and northern States, are without 
