ILLINOIS STATE BEE-KEEPEES' ASSOCIATION. 133 



bee-keepers usually find to be true, that the breeding queens do not 

 ship well, even when you send an old queen by express with a nucleus, 

 if that is permitted in your State, there is more danger that the old 

 queens will not get through in good shape. Furthermore, a queen 

 that is good e^iough to be a breeder is necessarily at least a year old, 

 and usually older than that, so that she is going to be of no value to 

 you before very long. We have tried queens from a few breeders and 

 we have found this, that if we get 'a half a dozen queens, untested 

 queens, and take good care of them and watch them carefully, that we 

 can usually pick out of that six at least one that is as good as any 

 queen you can buy in the market. So that is the policy that we have 

 been pursuing, and it is the policy that we recommend to bee-keepers 

 generally. 



So that instead of buying a queen from somebody who says that 

 his stock is the most resistant in the world, buy several, three or four 

 untested queens from two or three or four reputable breeders of Italians, 

 and you are pretty sure to get something that is better than you can 

 buy as a breeding queen for this work. 



Now, from the very beginning of the discussion of European foul 

 brood control, it has been pointed out that strong colonies resist it 

 better than weak ones. And we have known that to be true; there is 

 nothing new about that. And yet it was not until we began working 

 on wintering and found out what a real strong colony of bees is in the 

 spring that we found out the methods to recommend for the entire 

 elimination of European foul brood so that we will never see it. If you 

 will pardon a reference to a specific case, it happens to be an apiary 

 that my father owns. I went to his yard a few years ago, I had a half 

 a day to spend at home, and asked him how the bees were getting 

 along. Well, he said, they hadn't done anything, they were in bad 

 shape apparently, hadn't had any swarms or any indication of swarm- 

 ing, and things looked very blue. I went out and found, after looking 

 at seventeen, that fifteen of the seventeen were simply rotten with 

 European foul brood, and the other two were queenless, so we can call 

 it 100 per cent. I explained to him, the fact is I made up for him a 

 method of treatment, and I will explain that a httle later, and we sent 

 off to a breeder and got several untested queens, and they were in- 

 troduced. Then the rest of the afternoon, after I had written a letter 

 ordering the queens and explained a few things to him — I didn't have 

 much time, I had to leave in just a few hours — I showed him how to 

 take care of one colony, and then we let it go at that. But after that 

 I sat down and went over with him in careful detail the methods of 

 making 'a winter packing case, and I said: ''The thing to do for Euro- 

 pean foul brood is to simply get ready this winter packing case and then 

 get your bees into it, get these queens that I have recommended," 

 that I happened to buy from a man that I knew I could get queens 

 from right away, not better than anybody else's — "and get ready to 

 use this "winter packing case this winter." And the result is that never 

 a cell of European foul brood has appeared in that yard since. 



That is the point I want to make, and it is about wintering that I 

 got on the program this afternoon. You know we have come to the 

 place in our work in the Bureau of Entomology where, if we are going 



