This produced terrible consternation in the hive. There were no larvæ now in the hive young enough to produce a queen, for queen-cells cannot be raised from a larva more than three days old. The bees ran about the entrance in consternation, and the loud, shrill buzzing of their despair could be heard across the contented hum of the normal colonies. But Alice was already taking measures for their relief.
She prepared a flat stick an inch wide, just long enough to fit inside an empty brood-frame. Upon this stick she stuck a dozen little cups of molded beeswax, much the size and shape of an acorn cup, and into each cup she put a little lump of the white royal jelly taken from the queen-cells that she had destroyed. This operation is called “priming” the cells. The next step was to graft them.
For some time Alice and the boys had been carefully watching the egg-laying work of the Italian queens that they had bought, and they had already selected the two that seemed best to use as breeders. Neither of these, it should be said, was the famous three-dollar queen. In actual performance she was outstripped by several of the ordinary one-dollar sort.
From the hive of the best breeding queen Alice selected a comb containing eggs and just hatched young larvæ. These little larvæ were almost invisible, tiny white worms no larger than the comma on a page of print, floating in milky food at the bottom of each cell. It was delicate work to touch them, but with the point of a hairpin Alice fished out one of these for each of the primed artificial cells, laying it carefully down in the royal jelly. Hurriedly, then, lest the incipient queens should be chilled, she put this stick of cell-cups into the unfortunate queenless colony.
Next morning she went to look at it. Out of the dozen cells the queenless bees had accepted ten, were drawing the cells out already into the usual peanut shape, and had fed the larvæ large quantities of additional royal jelly. All was going well, and Alice proceeded to prepare a fresh set of cups for another colony.
It takes twelve days for a queen to hatch after the cell has been started in this manner. Early on the twelfth day, Alice selected the twelve colonies in most need of requeening, went through the combs, found the queens and killed them.
About three hours later she put into each of these hives one of her grafted cells, now on the point of hatching. In one case, indeed, the cell hatched in her fingers, and a beautiful, yellow, Italian virgin queen emerged.
In ten or twelve days more, all these young queens would be mated and laying, and these colonies could be considered Italian for the future—Italian, at least on the mother’s side, for the worker-bees would also be affected by the drone parentage.
Queen-rearing can only be carried on during a honey-flow, and while the good fireweed flow lasted, Alice raised several dozen queen-cells. All did not go smoothly, of course. Sometimes the bees refused to accept the artificial cells, tearing them down as fast as they were given; once a young queen hatched prematurely, and her royal jealousy immediately caused her to demolish all the rest of the cells on the frame, tearing out her young sisters and stinging them to death. Some queens were also lost on their mating flight, but in all Alice succeeded, with the help of the boys, in requeening about fifty colonies.
By this time most of the colonies had filled an extracting super apiece. Some had filled two. Nearly all the damaged sections of comb had been put back on the hives, and the bees had refilled them with alacrity, sealing them over as white and smooth as if they had been freshly built. There would be a good deal of section honey to sell after all.