294 
Annual Report of the 
Third. Conformity to the laws that govern the economy of the 
hive. 
All modifications of artificial swarming are based upon the fact 
of the bees being able to bear themselves a queen from any worker 
egg or larva which under ordinary treatment would have produced 
a worker, and is so changed by the peculiar food which the bees 
supply the young grub, that instead of twenty-one days being re¬ 
quired to perfect the insect it takes but sixteen, while its life is pro¬ 
longed to four years instead of three months. Why this is so, is 
one of the unexplained mysteries of the physiology of the honey¬ 
bee. Remove the queen from any colony and they will immediate¬ 
ly commence repairing their loss by building queen cells. On the 
ninth day, for as many cells as can be removed without injury, form 
a nucleus. On the tenth day cut out the cells by cutting around 
them far enough not to injure them; cut a like place in the comb 
of each nucleus to receive the cell and hold it in place, put the cell 
in the same position it was before removed. The nucleus will pro¬ 
tect and hatch the cell as well as the whole swarm. By this pro¬ 
cess the working force of the swarm is not reduced by raising queens. 
The cell will hatch on the sixteenth day, and in about eight da} 7 s 
after the queen leaves her cell she will commence laying, when the 
nucleus may be strengthened to a full swarm by giving them cap¬ 
ped brood and adhering bees from any hive, or by removing a strong- 
colony and placing the nucleus on its stand. A prolific queen is 
worth as much as all the workers of any hive. Bees often refusing 
to swarm at all, many going to the woods, sometimes becoming 
queenless, the time and expense of watching in swarming time, 
and many other perplexities have directed the attention of cultiv- 
tors to devising some more reliable method than natural swarming 
for increasing their colonies. In natural swarming the bee-keeper 
is entirely dependent on the caprice of his bees or rather on the 
natural laws which control their swarming. It is one of the laws 
of the hive that bees which have no matured queen never build any 
but drone-cells for storing honey, and are too large for raising work¬ 
ers. A want of a proper understanding of this law has in every 
instance proved an entire failure on the part of experienced as weH 
as inexperienced Apiarians in attempting to increase colonies by ar¬ 
tificial means. The above method of artificial swarming is super¬ 
ior to natural swarming, being less trouble. 
