In a private letter received from Mr. Langstroth he informed us that in the season of 1865 he bred over 300 Italian queens; these he disseminated to various' bee-masters on the American continent, and the united opinion of apiarians in that country was increasingly in favour of the decided advantage of the cultivation of the Italian bee. At the present date it is literally "all the rage" with bee-keepers there. With ourselves there is a quieter but not less genuine welcome accorded to it. In the _British Bee Journal_ for May 1877, the distinguished apiarian "A Renfrewshire Bee-keeper" writes: "After careful study and comparison of both I found the Italian superior for beauty, prolificness, power, and activity, and (to my view the greatest value of all) for _fresh blood_." To the testimonies already cited we will now add that of the late Mr. Woodbury. The following is extracted from the paper contributed by him to the _Bath and West of England Agricultural Journal_: "From my strongest Ligurian stock I took eight artificial swarms in the spring, besides depriving it of numerous brood-combs. Finding, in June, that the bees were collecting honey so fast that the queen could not find an empty cell in which to lay an egg, I was reluctantly compelled to put on a super. When this had been filled with thirty-eight pounds of the finest honeycomb,[10] I removed it, and as the stock hive (a very large one) could not contain the multitude of bees which issued from it, I formed them into another very large artificial swarm. The foregoing facts speak for themselves; but as information on this point has been very generally asked, I have no hesitation in saying that I believe the Ligurian honey bee infinitely superior in every respect to the only species that we have hitherto been acquainted with." [Footnote 10: This super was exhibited at our stand in the International Exhibition of 1862.]