A MONTHLY JOURNAL 



Devoted to the Interests of Honey Producers 

 f L0O a fear 



W. Z. HUTCHINSON, Editor and Publisher. 



VOL. XXIII. 



FLINT. MICHIGAN, AUGUST 1, 1910. 



NO. 8 



Grafting Artificial Cell Cups Without the Use 

 of Royal Jelly. 



T. S. HALL. 



I am sending you a photograph 

 showing the grafting of queen 

 cell cups on a comb without using 

 any royal jelly. These cell cups are 

 handled only twice from preparing for 

 grafting until they are ready to give to 

 nuclei; or go into the queen nursery. 



This is the easiest and shortest method 

 of getting cells built that I know of, and 

 results in the best queens. 



We dip the cell cups out of beeswax, 

 stick them on the comb as you see, and 

 then place the frame in a queenless 

 three-frame nucleus two hours for the 

 bees to warm them up and polish them 

 out; then we take out the frame with the 

 cups on it and proceed to graft them as 

 shown in the photograph. This grafting 

 is done in the afternoon, and the frame 

 is returned to the three-frame nucleus, 

 and the frame of cell cups thus grafted 



allowed to remain until the next morning, 

 when the cell cups are removed from the 

 nucleus and comb, stuck to a frame of 

 unsealed larvae, and placed in the cell- 

 building hive to be fed and capped over. 



The ninth or tenth day they are dis- 

 tributed to nuclei that have been queen- 

 less for two or three days. 



Some times we leave the cells on the 

 comb until the 12th day and place it in a 

 queenless colony for the cells to hatch, 

 and just drop the young queens in the 

 nuclei as they hatch. This can be done 

 in a few hours after the queen has been 

 removed. In our queen rearing yards 

 we use eight-frame Langstroth hives 

 with a division board in the center, thus 

 forming twin, three-frame nuclei in each 

 hive. 



Jasper, Ga., Oct. 12, 1909. 



