THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW 



295 



the parent colony and introduce the 

 queen to tlie nucleus at twilight as be- 

 fore. The old bees will have mostly 

 gone back, and the weak nucleus, con- 

 sisting principally of young bees, will 

 accept a queen if offered in almost any 

 way. In three or four days, when the 

 new queen is found laying, the old col- 

 ony can be dequeened, and the nucleus 

 put back, queen and all, immediately. 



By this plan the colony is not left 

 queenless for an hour; in fact, for some 

 days it has two queens at work. An- 

 other advantage is that in case of fail- 

 ure you still have the old queen. 



But if this plan is carefully adopted 

 it is not likely that one queen in twenty 

 will be lost, provided the nucleus is 

 guarded from robbing. 



Strouffville, Ontario, Can. 



Keep More Bees. It Counts when It Comes to a Grand 

 Total. $5,000 from 350 Colonies. 



H. G. SIBBALD 



J* HE year 1909 gave me the largest 

 m^j money returns of any since I 

 started bee-keeping twenty 

 years ago. Other years gave higher 

 averages per colony but this year I 

 had more bees. About 3.50 colonies 

 yielded over .50,000 lbs— 4,900 lbs. of e.x- 

 tracted honey and over 100 dozen of 

 comb. 



As I live in the city in the winter 

 and bottle and put up in small pack- 

 ages for the retail grocerytrade a large 

 proportion of _my crop and thereby get 

 a high price, this honey sold for nearly 

 $5,000. My help consisted of one young 

 man who had two previous years' ex- 

 perience with me. 



We were busy, as all the work in 

 connection with the production of this 

 honey, from spring until fall, including 

 packing for winter, was done between 

 May 1st and Oct. 1.5th — five months and 

 a half. 



INCREASED TO FOUR HUNDRED COLONIES. 



The 350 colonies were kept in three 

 yards each seven miles from the others 

 and were increased to a little over 400 

 during the season. 



Preceding the season two yards were 

 wintered outside, four colonies in a case, 

 two facing one way and two the oppo- 

 site way, all tight together, with planer 

 shavings around the outsides and over 



the top. The other yard was cellar win- 

 tered. All wintered well, with the bal- 

 ance in favor of the outside wintered. 



The spring work or management con- 

 sisted of equalizing stores so that all 

 had plenty (no feeding was done), un- 

 packing, clipping queens, scraping and 

 cleaning hives, supers, and combs. 



The season's management consisted 

 first in supering. If the bees didn't 

 come up and occupy the super promptly, 

 brood was raised up. All the colonies 

 were ventilated by raising the hives 

 from the bottom boards three-quarters 

 of an inch. Queen rearing was started 

 and at least 15 nuclei were kept in each 

 yard, so that a ready supply of young 

 laying queens were obtained whenever 

 required. When the first super was 

 about half or two-thirds full it was 

 lifted up and another put in under- 

 neath. In some cases three supers were 

 used on a hive, but as a rule the upper 

 one was extracted in time to relieve the 

 second super when it was ready to lift 

 up. Stacking up too much does not ap- 

 peal to me any more. It's too much 

 trouble and work to make the weekly 

 examinations when more than two full 

 sized supers are used, and besides, dark 

 honey comes in the wake of the white 

 and we must be up with the extracting 

 or get out beautiful white honey dark- 

 ened. 



