When I commenced to introduce Italian bees in my apiary, six years ago, I received from one of our best queen-breeders a very nice looking queen. She was very yellow from the waist to the tip of the abdomen. Well, I raised a number of queens to get drones, and next season I raised some more, from the same queen, to replace the misallied queens. But lo, one-fourth of my young queens were either crippled, or drone laying, or laying non-hatching eggs. Yet these queens were as yellow as their mother, and it seemed as if the brighter they looked, the poorer they were. Then my first imported queens came. They were not yellow, but dark. The first rings of the abdomen were leather-colored, the last were entirely black or nearly so. I wrote to Dr. Blumhof, reproaching him for having sent me so dark queens. He replied that all the healthier queens in Italy are dark, and that it was well ascertained there, that the light-colored queens were not so good as the dark. The light-colored queens, added the Doctor, seem to have the chlorosis. Prof. Mona told the same thing to Mr. A. Grimm, when he was in Italy. See _American Bee Journal_, vol. III. From this we can guess that the selecting of the brightest yellow queens for breeders, is one of the causes of the failure of the queens raised. But in-and-in breeding is another, and according to my experience, a main cause of weakness. As soon as my first imported queens were on hand, I commenced raising queens from them, and from that time forward I raised artificial queens every year from newly imported queens. Those queens mate with drones from queens of the preceding year’s importation, and so on. I do not care for the color of these queens, but not one of them is crippled or proves to be a poor layer. My five best stocks this year, all have artificial queens. Three of these queens are with swarms of last year. I hived them in one of friend Price’s hives. These swarms are better than the three original stocks they came from, though these latter have raised natural queens in the height of the swarming season, as friend Price prefers they should. The five stocks referred to gave me from seventy to one hundred pounds each, of box honey. I suppose I should be thought very _exigeant_ if I were not content with such results, in so dry a season as this.