But the conduct of the bees towards the old queen destined to conduct the first swarm, is very different. Always accustomed to respect their fertile queens, " they do not forget what they owe to her : they al : low her the most uncontrouled liberty. if She is per mitted to approach the royal cells ; and f she even at tempts to destroy them, no opposition is offered by the bees. Thus her inclinations are not obstructed ; and we cannot ascribe her flight, as that of the young queens, to the resistance she experiences." These ) observations greely increase the difficulty of attempt ing to account for swarming : we acknowledge that here we can find no satisfactory explanation. The old queen, it has been supposed, becomes agitated by the presence of so many royal cells, and at the pros pect of the combats in which she has to engage, and she also communicates her agitation to the workers. The agitatiori of the females excites motion in the workers, which increases their animal heat, and raises the temperature of the hive to such an insupportable degree, that they hasten to leave it. In a populous hive, where the thermometer stood from 92° to 97° in a tine summer day, it rose above 101° during the tumult which preceded swarming.
The extraordinary instinct and precautions so con spicuous in bees, are apparently affected during the period of swarming. We cannot admit, with those observers, who seem more actuated by the love of the marvellous than an exposure of truth, that they are endowed with that prescience which induces them, before their departure, to prepare a place for their. reception. On issuing. from the hive, bees, so nearly as we can determine, have no object in view ; and they often resort to situations the most unlikely, and evidently unsuitable for their convenience or preser vation. After rising in the air, it is commonly some
tree that arrests their progress, and the queen fre quently alights at the unsheltered extremity of a branch, where the bees that may have formed into va rious clusters in the vicinity, come to surround her. But we have known them repeatedly swarm on the grass, near the hive they had forsaken, notwithstand ing trees were at no great distance.
Bees swarm only during the best weather, and in the finest part of the day. Sometimes all the pre cursors of swarming, disorder and agitation, have been seen : but a cloud passed before the sun, and tranquillity was restored.
If a hive swarms oftener than once, the new swarms consist of those bees that have been abroad when the first event took place, added to young ones come from the eggs, laid by the queen before her depar ture. Each is led out by a young queen, as there arc usually several royal cells in a hive : but the bees, can prevent the whole queens nearly of an equ'al age from leaving their cells, though come to maturity : and when they do liberate them, it is according to their age, which they have some secret means of ascertain ing ; for the oldest are invariably liberated first.
The young swarm, whether removed from the place where it settles or not, begins to work ; cells are constructed of wax from the honey the bees have carried along with them ; and nature has so it, that the first eggs laid by the queen produce the operative part of the community.