Page:How to Keep Bees.djvu/72

46 should be taken to prevent colonies from becoming queenless. In case, through carelessness, a colony is thus victimised it will usually refuse to accept a queen, though sometimes it may be induced to accept a capped queen cell. If this is not successful, the combs, with the bees adhering, should be removed to an empty hive nearby, placing a frame of brood containing a queen cell, if possible, and a frame or two of foundation in the old hive. The workers, coming back from the field, will enter their hive and the moved comb will soon be deserted by all except the laying worker; she, with her characteristic fatuity, will remain on the deserted combs, laying eggs until she dies of exhaustion. A surer remedy than this, but a more troublesome one, is to unite this colony with another, or to scatter the combs from the victimised hive, bees and all, among other colonies of the apiary; meanwhile giving the depleted hive a frame or two of good brood, with a queen cell, if possible, so that the bees that return to it will find normal conditions. What happens to the laying worker when she finds herself in a colony with a queen, we do not know. Probably, if she persists in laying eggs, she is killed; possibly she forsakes her evil ways, and returns to the straight and narrow path of respectable citizenship.

We do not understand why laying workers are developed. Some have claimed that too much royal jelly was given them when larvae; and some, that after a colony is queenless, the jelly is fed to workers and thus develops them so they are able to lay eggs.