had a young queen almost mature, so that the
process of building large combs would be of short continuance; for as
soon as the young queen begins to lay, the bees at once commence
building combs adapted to the reception of worker eggs. In some of my
attempts to rear artificial swarms by moving a full stock, as described
above, I have had combs built of enormous size, nearly four inches
through! and these monster combs have afterwards been pieced out on
their lower edge, with worker cells for the accommodation of the young
queen! So uniformly do the bees with an unhatched queen, build in the
way described, that I can often tell at a single glance, by seeing what
kind of comb they are building, that a hive is queenless, or that having
been so, they have now a fertile young queen. When a new colony is
formed, by dividing the old hive, the queenless part has thousands of
cells filled with brood and eggs, and young bees will be hourly
hatching, for at least three weeks: and by this time, the young queen
will be laying eggs, so that there will be an interval of not more than
three weeks, during which no accessions will be made to the numbers of
the colony. But when a new swarm is formed by moving, not an egg will be
deposited for nearly three weeks; and not a bee will be hatched for
nearly six weeks; and during all this time, the colony will rapidly
decrease, until by the time that the progeny of the young queen begins
to emerge from their cells, the number of bees in the new hive will be
so small, that it would be of no value, even if its combs were of the
best construction.

Every observing bee-keeper must have noticed how rapidly even a powerful
swarm diminishes in number, for the first three weeks after it has been
hived. In many cases, before the young begin to hatch, it does not
contain one half its original number; so very great is the mortality of
bees during the height of the working season.

I have most thoroughly tested, in the only way in which it can be
practiced in the ordinary hives, this last plan of artificial swarming,
and do not hesitate to say that it does not possess the very slightest
practical value; and as this is the method which Apiarians have usually
tried, it is not strange that they have almost unanimously pronounced
Artificial swarming to be utterly worthless. The experience of Dzierzon
on this point has been the same with my own.

Another method of artificial swarming has been zealously advoc