In the July No. of the Journal. Mr. John M. Price contributed an article on “Natural, Hardy and Prolific Queens,” which was no doubt his conviction of the truth of the matter at the time; but as it does not agree with my experience, I will give the other side of the question. If I understand his theory, it is that queens reared in stocks deprived of their queen when not under the “swarming impulse,” are smaller, less prolific and shorter lived than what are termed _natural queens_. I am fully aware that Mr. Price does not stand alone on said theory, and yet I believe it to be an error. For the sake of distinguishing, we will state that queens bred in full stocks from which the mother queen led forth a swarm, or queens which were _started_ while the old queen remained in the hive, are _natural_ queens, and all others _artificial_. I have both kinds in my apiary, and have had for several years, and can see no difference in their size, beauty, fertility or longevity. I have repeatedly kept artificial queens until they were three years old, and had one very prolific queen which died in March last, being then three years and nine months old. I left her as an experiment, to see what age she would attain; but my practice is to remove queens in their second or third year. Of course a few die before they are two years old, for they are not exempt from the ills that bee “flesh is heir to.” But that four or five in succession should pass off the stage of action in a single stock in one season, is something before unheard of. I do not know what effect brother P.’s revolvable, reversible, double-cased hive _might_ have upon the tender life of a young queen; but it seems to have been most disastrous, for we have no such work here in the old Keystone State. It is a matter of very great importance in the success of an apiary, that our stocks are supplied with the _right kind_ of queens, and in order to effect this desirable result, something more is necessary to a full understanding of the subject, than simply to know that bees, when deprived of their queen, will attempt to supply her place. I find little difficulty in rearing _fine_ queens, with the following conditions: 1st. a suitable queen mother; 2d. fair weather and good pasturage; 3d. a full stock, in which honey and pollen are abundant (not a nucleus where starvation stares them in the face). It is a settled point with me, that the production of queens is a matter wholly under the control of the worker bees; and we lack evidence that a queen _ever_ lays an egg in a royal cell. If the bee is guided by instinct _alone_, and the production of a queen depended on the depositing of a _peculiar_ egg by the queen in a royal cell (an egg, differing from the worker or drone eggs), it would follow that, on the loss or removal of the queen when no such eggs existed in the hive, no young queens could be produced.