Page:How to Keep Bees.djvu/201

Rh this lump of excited regicides and saving the queen. One is to drop the ball in a shallow bowl of water. This baptism seems to cool the hot blood and the bees swim off, trying to preserve their own lives. The other is to smoke the ball until it dissolves into individual bees, so anxious to get breath for themselves that they forget to shut off the breath of the obnoxious queen. There is a danger attending the latter method, for unless the smoking be done carefully and without blowing hot air on the bees, they will become infuriated by the heat and surely sting the queen; as they evidently regard her, and rightly, as the cause of their suffering.

WHEN TO INTRODUCE A QUEEN

The colony should have been queenless long enough to realise the danger of the situation, but not long enough to have done much toward building queen cells and developing larval queens; in the latter case they prefer a queen of their own dynasty and object to any other. Thus, if a queen is to be superseded she should be removed and, about two days later, the new one should be introduced.

It requires experience to know certainly that a colony has become queenless, for often, when there is no brood or eggs in the cells there is a virgin queen, which eludes the eye, as she does not appear very differently from the workers; a colony with virgin queens of its own cannot be induced to accept an introduced queen.