A Manual or an Easy Method of Managing Bees
Book Excerpt
The day of second swarming, and all after that during the same season, may be most certainly predicted as follows: Listen near the entrance of the hive in the evening. If a swarm is coming forth the next day, the Queen will be heard giving an alarm at short intervals. The same alarm may be heard the next morning. The observer will generally hear two Queens at a time in the same hive, the one much louder than the other. The one making the least noise is yet in her cell, and in her minority. The sound emitted by the Queens is peculiar, differing materially from that of any other bee. It consists of a number of monotonous notes in rapid succession, similar to those emitted by the mud-wasp when working her mortar and joining it to her cells, to raise miss-wasps. If, after all, the weather is unfavorable to their swarming two or three days while in this peculiar stage, they will not be likely to swarm