The American bee-keepers manage, it is said, to hatch royal larvæ and pupæ in little boxes heated carefully by a small lamp. We have not heard of any English apiarians who have pursued this method; and the probability is that the difficulty of regulating the warmth accurately, makes the results so uncertain and disappointing as not to tend to the adoption of the method among us. Like the "incubators" for the artificial hatching of poultry, so many circumstances combine to mar hopes cherished in the use of them, that it is altogether more satisfactory to rely on natural processes for the production of the young of both fowls and bees. In all the processes of queen rearing described, we cannot but be struck with the inextinguishable love shown to the undeveloped young, and the passionate yearning for a mother-bee displayed by the workers. It matters not whether the brood presented to them be taken from their own stock or from another community; they will at once cluster upon the cells containing larvæ, and devotedly tend them till they come forth as perfect insects. The emerging progeny may even belong to another variety, Ligurian, Cyprian, or Carniolan; still the same complete devotion will be displayed. Nor is the willingness of a colony to receive an introduced queen affected by the fact of her belonging to a different race from the subjects to whom she is given. Yet, we do observe strange differences in the readiness with which a stranger sovereign is acknowledged. In some instances there is no hostility manifested to an uncaged queen, who is allowed to run down among the combs of a community which is without a mother. This is especially the case with a stock just mourning its discovered loss. At other times, even with careful introduction, and caging for from twenty-four to forty-eight hours, so unamiable a temper is displayed, that the supplied queen is refused; and she is either stung, or, more frequently, is so thickly clustered around and upon as to be suffocated. Occasionally, indeed, such a resolute determination is shown to have no monarch but one of their own raising, that the only course is to supply brood-comb with eggs to such a community, or to unite them with another stock which has a queen. We can no more account for these vagaries of so-called instinct, than we can for those displayed among human beings endowed with what we consider the higher faculty of reason. CHAPTER XXI. FEEDING. Troughs--Dangers of this Method--Bottle Feeders--Cheshire's Feeding Stage--Neighbour's Can Feeder--The "Round Feeder"--Autumn Feeding--Spring Feeding--Uses of Precautions--Summer Feeding of Swarms--Flour-cake--Barley-sugar or Sugar-cake--Mr. Hunter's Recipe.