B. “If you treat the bees right they will not harm you; besides we can have a protection, made of wire cloth, or what is more handy, a piece of bobbinet to place over the face; and by keeping the hands wet, the bees will not sting, unless they are badly treated.”
Q. “What a fool I have been. I have kept bees all my life, and never before knew what I needed. I suppose if you can lift out the combs, as you say you can, you could find the king’s house and perhaps the king himself?”
B. “There is no such bee in the hive.”
Q. “What! no king bee! Why I always understood that a colony of bees without a king and ruler, whose mandates are strictly obeyed, will not be worth anything.”
B. “The bee you allude to is the mother of the colony and is called the queen; but she has no house or particular spot in the hive in which she dwells. The worker-bees, however, construct what are called queen-cells, in which queens are reared; but they never remain in them, except only while in embryo.”
Q. “Why, Mr. B., you seem to know as much about bees as the man I heard a neighbor speak of. He said there was a man living in Iowa that reared king bees (perhaps you would call them queen bees) of a superior and different kind from the common bee, and brought from some other country.”
B. “Yes, we rear our own queens, or in other words we cause the bees to do so, by our artificial process. This we do for the purpose of furnishing fertilized queens to old stocks, when their queens are taken away, as is the case in producing artificial swarms.”
Q. “Then you can make bees swarm, and rear queens at your will?”
B. “Yes.”
Q. “But do you never find a hive that is not in the notion of swarming? I always thought that bees knew when they wanted to swarm, better than man did.”