No. 6. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 389 



is over, by feeding the colony daily half a pint of honey or sugar 

 syrup. But do not try this in the spring, for the weather is too 

 cold then. 



1)0 not make the mistake of thinking that a very weak colony 

 will do to start cells. It is true that you may have a single frame 

 of brood in a hive with bees enough to cover it, and have a cell 

 started and a queen reared, but such queens would not be worth a 

 cent a dozen. Remember that the queen is the keystone of all suc- 

 cessful bee-keeping, and that j'ou cannot afford to have poor queens, 

 so you can well afford to have queen-cells started in a strong colony. 



Of course you will want queens reared from your very best stock, 

 so you will be likely to take the colony that has your best queen. 

 Sometimes, however, it may happen that you may want more cells 

 than your best colony would rear, and still you want to use that 

 stock, or for some- reason you may desire to rear from your best 

 stock without disturbing its queen. In that case you may resort 

 to grafting. Suppose you have made queenless a strong colony 

 which does not contain your best queen. Two to four days later 

 you will get from your best queen a frame of brood containing 

 very young larvae, this frame to be returned after you have got 

 what you want from it. Of course the weather must be hot enough 

 so there will be no danger of chilling the brood. Go with this 

 frame of brood to your queenless hive, take one queen-cell after 

 another, take out the larva in the cell and put in its place a larva 

 from your choice queen. A quill toothpick may do for a tool, or 

 you may take a stalk of timothy and cut it in the form of a quill 

 toothpick. You will find it an easy matter to get the larva from the 

 queen-cell, and not very difficult to pick a larva — take a very small 

 one — out of your frame of choice brood. Set this larva right in the 

 jelly where the first larva was. The bees will generally treat the 

 grafted larva just as if there had been no change. 



One advantage about this grafting is that you may thus be sure 

 that all your queens are reared from larvae that are not too old. 

 It may be a good plan for you to mark each grafted cell, so you 

 can be sure of their identification. Take a pin or, better still, a 

 slender one and one half inch wire nail, and thrust it into the 

 comb directly over the cell. 



GETTING QUEEN-CELLS BUILT IN A COLONY WITH A LAYING QUEEN. 



As already stated, when a colony learns its queenlessne^s, it pro- 

 ceeds to rear a queen. It is also true that if one or more frames 

 of brood belonging to a colony are so situated that the queen is 

 some little distance from them, the bees on such combs seem more 

 or less inclined to consider themselves queenless, and may take 



