e has been impregnated, and has begun to lay eggs.
Some of the central combs or those on which the bees are most thickly
clustered, should be first lifted out, for she will almost always be
found on one of them; the Apiarian when he has caught her, should remove
the wings on one side with a pair of scissors taking care not to hurt
her. On examining his hives next season, let him remove one of the two
remaining wings from the queen. The third season, he may deprive her of
her last wing. Bees always have four wings, a pair on each side. This
plan saves him the trouble of marking his hives so as to know the age of
the queens they contain.

As the fertility of the queen generally decreases after the second year,
I prefer, just before the drones are destroyed, to kill all the old
queens that have entered their third year. In this way, I guard against
some of my stocks becoming queenless, in consequence of the queen dying
of old age, when there is no worker-brood in the hive, from which they
can rear another: or of having a worthless, drone-laying queen whose
impregnation has been retarded. These old queens are removed at that
period of the year when their colony is strong in numbers; and as the
honey-harvest is by this time, nearly over, their removal is often a
positive benefit, instead of a loss. The population is prevented from
being over crowded at a time when the bees are consumers and not
producers, and when the young queen, reared in the place of the old one
matures, she will rapidly fill the cells with eggs, and raise a large
number of bees to take advantage of the late honey-harvest, and to
prepare the hive to winter most advantageously.

The certainty, rapidity and ease of making artificial swarms with my
hives, will be such as to amaze those most who have had the greatest
experience and success in the management of bees. Instead of weeks
wasted in watching the Apiary, in addition to all the other vexations
and embarrassments which are so often found to attend reliance on
natural swarming, the Apiarian will find not only that he can create all
his new colonies in a very short time, but that he can, if he chooses,
entirely prevent the issue of all after-swarms. In order to do this, he
ought to examine the stocks which are raising young queens, in season to
cut out all the queen cells but one, before the larvae come to maturity.
If he gave them a sealed queen nearly mature, they will raise no others,
and no swarming