QUEEN REARING.
Protection of Queen-cells--Nucleus Hives--Various Methods
of Queen Rearing--American Plan--Introduction of Stranger
Queens--Difficulties.
The breeding of queens can only be done with ease and complete success
in bar-frame hives. If, on examination of the frames of a stock,
queen-cells with brood in them are found, these may be protected by
means of little wire cages from the animosity of the mother-bee, and in
due course the princesses, as they hatch out, may be transferred to a
small box, with a piece of comb and a few bees belonging to the hive.
Care must be taken not to let the cage touch the cell over which it is
placed, and it should be thrust into the comb only to the base of one
set of cells. The best time for thus affording protection is when the
larva is six or seven days old.
A second plan is to take from a hive, late in the afternoon, a comb
containing worker-eggs, with brood in more advanced stages, and a
sufficient number of bees to keep up warmth enough to promote the
development of the larvæ. These must all be put into a very small
hive, and a supply of honey and water should be given. In the course
of a few days a queen-cell, or cells, will be formed, worker-eggs
transferred into them, and these, in process of time, will come forth
as princesses. When fertilised they will be ready for using in other
hives.
[Illustration: Fig. 64.--Queen Cage over Sealed Cell.]
A third method is to set a small empty hive over a full stock, and,
when the bees using the entrance of the upper one are sufficiently
numerous, a brood-comb with eggs and adhering bees may be placed in the
top hive. Then, in a day or two, the aperture between the two may be
closed, and the nucleus being removed, another can be put in its place,
and the process repeated till as many queens as are required have been
raised.
Fourthly. Two or three combs with brood and honey may be taken
from a hive, and having cut out a nearly triangular piece of comb,
a queen-cell with comb, nearly equal in size to the hole, may be
inserted, as shown in the figure. This will expedite the rearing of
the princess. The bees will soon fill up the intervening spaces, and
the daily emerging young bees will make subjects enough for the young
monarch, till she is needed for the sovereignty of a larger population.
If the miniature stock should dwindle before the young queen lays and
replenishes the numbers, young bees, which have never flown, may be
introduced from other hives, and these will be received with pleasure
by the remaining workers. Or another frame with plenty of bees may be
exchanged for one of the empty ones. This latter plan involves some
danger of fighting, which is avoided by supplying the newly-hatched
young.
[Illustration: Fig. 65.--Inserted Queen Cell.]
The American bee-keepers manage, it is said, to hatch royal larvæ
and pupæ in little boxes heated carefully by a small lamp. We have
not heard of any English apiarians who have pursued this method;
and the probability is that the difficulty of regulating the warmth
accurately, makes the results so uncertain and disappointing as not
to tend to the adoption of the method among us. Like the "incubators"
for the artificial hatching of poultry, so many circumstances combine
to mar hopes cherished in the use of them, that it is altogether more
satisfactory to rely on natural processes for the production of the
young of both fowls and bees.
In all the processes of queen rearing described, we cannot but be
struck with the inextinguishable love shown to the undeveloped young,
and the passionate yearning for a mother-bee displayed by the workers.
It matters not whether the brood presented to them be taken from
their own stock or from another community; they will at once cluster
upon the cells containing larvæ, and devotedly tend them till they
come forth as perfect insects. The emerging progeny may even belong
to another variety, Ligurian, Cyprian, or Carniolan; still the same
complete devotion will be displayed. Nor is the willingness of a
colony to receive an introduced queen affected by the fact of her
belonging to a different race from the subjects to whom she is given.
Yet, we do observe strange differences in the readiness with which
a stranger sovereign is acknowledged. In some instances there is no
hostility manifested to an uncaged queen, who is allowed to run down
among the combs of a community which is without a mother. This is
especially the case with a stock just mourning its discovered loss.
At other times, even with careful introduction, and caging for from
twenty-four to forty-eight hours, so unamiable a temper is displayed,
that the supplied queen is refused; and she is either stung, or,
more frequently, is so thickly clustered around and upon as to be
suffocated. Occasionally, indeed, such a resolute determination is
shown to have no monarch but one of their own raising, that the only
course is to supply brood-comb with eggs to such a community, or
to unite them with another stock which has a queen. We can no more
account for these vagaries of so-called instinct, than we can for those
displayed among human beings endowed with what we consider the higher
faculty of reason.