THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW 



331 



bred queens. The California spring in 

 the San Joaquin valley opens three 

 months earlier than the Eastern queen 

 breeder can supply queens, and with the 

 first rays of spring, indications of black 

 brood begin to appear. Because of the 

 shortage of early bred queens, indeed the 

 inability of the Eastern market to supply 

 queens of any kind early enough, it 

 seems advisable for the bee keeper to 

 procure some good breeding stock the 



ing fairly good matings, even with a 

 limited amount of breeding stock at one's 

 disposal, can be early in the season 

 better managed than later, by simply 

 preventing the rearing of drones in the 

 apiary except in those colonies to be 

 bred from; and further, by encouraging 

 the rearing of a superabundance of 

 drones of the desired strain through 

 stimulative feeding and the judicious in- 

 sertion of drone combs into the brood 



Infected combs hauled from the apiary and ready for melting up. 



fall before, and then plan to dissipate 

 some of the extra energy and activity of 

 his bees early the next spring in multi- 

 plying this stock and requeening his 

 apiary before black brood gets much of a 

 start. This will not only supply queens 

 early in the season when they are wanted 

 but will be found to be much more eco- 

 nomical and hence within the reach of 

 every bee keeper, big or little. Under 

 the Alexander-Miller system of treat- 

 ment, the raising of one's own queens 

 becomes simplified in that ripe queen 

 cells, or newly emerged virgin queens, 

 may be supplied queenless colonies 

 directly, thus eliminating all of the work 

 of stocking and establishing nuclei for 

 mating purposes. The matter of secur- 



nests more especially where there are 

 old queens. 



In the actual raising of queens, the 

 common practice of simply distributing 

 brood from the breeding colony to the 

 queenless colonies that it is desired to 

 requeen, is to be discouraged. Such a 

 practice violates several of the canons of 

 the queen breeder. To begin with, the 

 chances are, since the colony has been 

 suffering with black brood, that it is 

 seriously depleted in numbers, and hence 

 not of sufficient strength to properly 

 feed and build down queen cells. Further 

 it has been deprived of its queen and 

 brood for some days and will hasten the 

 development of queen cells to such a 

 degree as to produce a lot of abortive, 



