CHAPTER XX.
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.
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.
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.