THE REARING OF QUEEN BEES. 29 



Tested queens which have been kept in full colonies to observe 

 purity of mating, and which after one season show that they possess 

 ability to produce strong colonies, are sold as "select tested." How- 

 ever, it is to be feared that some queen breeders are not careful enough 

 about this test and that queens are often sold under this guarantj^ which 

 are siraplj' tested queens one year old, which simpl}^ means that their 

 life of usefulness is thereby shorter by one year. For breeding, nothing 

 but the very best of " select tested" queens should be used. Great care 

 should be exercised in choosing such queens bj^ watching purity of 

 mating, prolificness, hone}^ production of workers, disposition of bees, 

 tendency to keep a very large colony of bees at all seasons; and especially, 

 care should be taken that brood rearing does not cease as soon as the 

 honey flow slackens in midsummer. Some bees, otherwise good, will 

 stop brood rearing with the first sign of a decrease in honey, with the 

 result that the colony enters the fall flow with old bees, and that 

 scarcely anything but old bees are in the colony at the beginning of 

 winter. This is probabl}' the essential cause of the excessive death of 

 bees in early spring, known as "spring dwindling." 



NECESSITY OF PURE STOCK:. 



The necessity of purely -mated queens for breeding can not be too 

 emphatically urged. The so-called " hybrids," or mismated queens, 

 produce young queens of so much variability in ever}- character that 

 it is ver}^ unwise to use them. There is one phase of queen breeding 

 which would doubtless prove useful, but which has not yet been tried 

 to any extent. The first cro^ises of various races have proven very 

 useful; as, for example, the cross between Cyprians and Carniolans, 

 but no breeder to the writer's knowledge has ever undertaken to fix 

 the type. That this could be done seems ver}' probable, reasoning 

 from what we know of crosses in other animals, and by careful selec- 

 tion of prolific queens whose workers showed all the characteristics 

 of the first cross, these crosses would doubtless prove valuable as 

 breeders. Under no other circumstances, however, should mismated 

 queens be used. 



SELECTION OF DRONES. 



The selection of drones is one of the things in which the vast 

 majority of bee keepers are notoriously careless. Queen breeders 

 will select a breeding queen with great care and allow her progeny to 

 mate with drones from any hive in the apiary, and just as long as this 

 is done there can be no advance in the t3"pes. Drones should not be 

 allowed to fly except from colonies where the queens are prolific and 

 the bees good workers, and just as much care should be exercised in 

 the choice of colonies for the production of drones as for breeding 



