September, igii. 



American IBgc Journal j 



the 8 days take off the upper story, and 

 in place of the excluder put on a piece 

 of wire-cloth that will allow no bee to 

 pass up, and over this put an empty 

 hive-body, into which you will put the 

 frames of brood, brushing off the bees 

 in front of the hive. Be sure that not 

 a bee is left in the upper story. Now 

 put in your queen and cover up, bee- 

 tight. The young bees that hatch out, 

 knowing no other mother, will of 

 course be kind to the queen. In 5 days 

 put the nucleus on a new stand, with an 

 entrance large enough for only one 

 bee to pass at a time, so that robber- 

 bees will not attack it. Of course it 

 can be strengthened up into a full col- 

 ony by sealed brood from other colo- 

 nies. 



Ordinarily this will be considered 

 too much trouble for any but a very 

 valuable queen, and it will be consid- 

 ered better to take less trouble and 

 run the risk of losing a queen now and 

 then. But there is a way that is less 

 troublesome that very much reduces 

 the danger of loss in introducing : 



Remove to a new stand the hive into 

 which the queen is to be introduced, 

 destroy the old queen, and take from 

 the hive 2 or 3 frames of brood with 

 adhering bees. These you will put into 

 an empty hive on the old stand. Now 

 introduce your new queen into the old 

 hive in the usual way. After she has 

 begun laying, put the hive back on its 

 old stand, returning to it the 2 or 3 

 frames of brood that had been taken 

 away, destroying any queen-cells that 

 may have been started on them. The 

 secret of the greater success lies in the 

 fact that when the hive is moved to a 

 new stand all the field-bees return to 

 the old stand, and the queen is intro- 

 duced to a colony of younger bees, and 

 it is the older bees that are likely to be 

 hostile to a new queen. 



When the hive is returned from its 

 new stand to the old place, there will 

 be some field-bees that will return from 

 the field to the new stand, but these 

 will be kindly received in the near-by 

 hives. You can, however, avoid losing 

 any bees from the colony. Instead of 

 putting the hive on a new stand, put it 

 on top of the other hive, or on top of 

 the supers, if there be any supers. 

 Then no bees will go to any other 

 hive. 



good many bee-keepers have 500 colo- 

 nies each, or more. With 500 colonies 

 the income would be more than enough 

 to keep the average bee-keeper the rest 

 of his days. "There's millions in it !'' 



Note that no stings and no loss in 

 winter or swarming time. To make 

 the thing complete it should be added 

 that no pasture is needed — just put the 

 bees in a Controllable Hive and the 

 hundred dollars a year from each hive 

 is sure, even if there is not a blossom 

 withing 100 miles. 



The very strange thing in the case is 

 that practical bee-keepers go on year 

 after year without taking advantage of 

 this wonderful hive! If a single prac- 

 tical bee-keeper with as many as 50 or 

 100 colonies uses this wonderful hive, 

 nothing has been said about it in the 

 bee-papers, and bee-keepers do not 

 generally fail to make known their 

 successes. 



Why is it that this hive is not adver- 

 tised in the bee-papers, which are read 

 by the very men who buy most of the 

 bee-hives that are used ? Probably for 

 two reasons. The first is that bee- 

 keepers know better than to be fooled 

 by such an advertisement, and the sec- 

 ond is, that no bee-paper could be in- 

 duced to accept such an advertisement, 

 unless to give it a free insertion as in 

 the present case. That a reputable ag- 

 ricultural paper should accept it seems 

 almost beyond belief, for as a rule such 

 papers are conducted by men that are 

 both honest and intelligent. 



The Cotton CoutroUable Hive 



O. B. Griffin has sent the following, 

 clipped from a reputable agricultural 

 paper: 



Every familv. that has a spot of land, can 

 keep Honey Bees and raise Honey for fam- 

 ily use or for Market. One hundred dollars 

 income from one Co>itrollabl€ Hive oi Bees in 

 one year. Lots of Honey and Lots of Money, 

 keeping Bees in Controllable Hive^. Xo stings, 

 Xo loss in winter or swarming time. .Some- 

 thijiM new in Bee Management. For particulars. 

 write C. B. Cotton. , Maine. 



Older readers will recognize an ac- 

 quaintance of a g:ood many years ago, 

 although at that time it was Mrs. Lizzie 

 E. Cotton. So the "Something new in 

 Bee-Management " is not so very new, 

 dating back some 30 years. 



But why not elaborate a little on that 

 " One Inindred dollars income from 

 one Controllable Hive of Bees in one 

 year?" Suppose a man has lOO colo- 

 nies. If tlie income from each is $100, 

 he will have $10,000 in a year. But a 



A Mistake of Beg'iiiuer.s — Robber- 

 Bees 



It is only natural that beginners 

 should make mistakes, but there is one 

 mistake that is likely to bring such 

 serious results that the beginner should 

 be specially warned against it. It is 

 the mistake of thinking that when rob- 

 bing has gotten under way it can be at 

 once stopped by removing the object 

 of attack. 



Carelessly, a beginner has left a sec- 

 tion of honey standing on a hive, and 

 when he next sees it he finds little left 

 but the remains of the comb. At once 

 he takes that away. The returning rob- 

 bers not finding it where they had left 

 it, go to searching in the neighbor- 

 hood, and a fierce onslaught may be 

 made on the nearest colony. If he 

 had left the mutilated section where it 

 was, the bees would have cleaned all 

 the honey out of it, hunted over the 

 spot for a time, and then concluding 

 they had gotten all that was to be had 

 they would have quietly left. If a sec- 

 tion, or a comb of honey, thus exposed, 

 be discovered when only a little of the 

 honey has been taken by the robbers, it 

 may be safely taken away if in its place 

 a scrap of comb containing a little 

 honev be left. 



If robber-bees have made an attack 

 upon a nucleus or a colony, the begin- 

 ner thinks he can make a sure thing of 

 saving it by carrying it down cellar. 

 How can the robbers possibly get at it 

 there ? But wait. When the robbers 

 find only a vacant space where the hive 

 stood, they perhaps think the hive has 

 been moved to one side or the other; 

 at any rate, an attack is pretty sure to 

 be made upon one of the neigliboring 

 hives, and if tiiat be carried down cel- 



lar it only means attack upon another 

 colony, and the robbers can shift their 

 point of attack just as often as new 

 hives are cellared. Even if neighbor- 

 ing colonies should successfully resist 

 attack, when the hive is returned to its 

 place from the cellar the robbers are 

 pretty sure to attack it with fresh vigor. 

 The thing to do, when the hive is 

 taken into the cellar, is to set in its 

 place a hive containing perhaps an old 

 comb with a little honey in it. The 

 bees will clean this out, and after thor- 

 oughly satisfying themselves the booty 

 is all gone, they will leave it, and the 

 next day the removed colony may be 

 returned to its place. Possibly it may 

 be just as well to have the decoy hive 

 entirely empty, only so it looks as 

 much as possible like the removed hive. 



Queen-Mating Stations 



The following letter has been re- 

 ceived at this office : 



The undersigned wishes to call attention 

 to article in the June-July Review, headed. 

 "Mating Stations." and would suggest that 

 it might be brought up at the next National 

 convention. In the event of a successful 

 launching of such a proposition, we stand 

 ready to lend our aid. Of course, we can 

 hear some say, "We don't need it,' that 

 they can secure purity of mating in their 

 owii yards, etc.. but we are under the im- 

 pression that it would have a tendency 

 eventually to abolish the poor grade of 

 queens, and give us all a higher standard. 



Irvington. N. J. Sawyer & Hedden. 



The passage referred to is in an arti- 

 cle by F. L. Pollock, and is as follows: 



In Switzerland experiment stations are 

 maintained where virgin queens can be 

 mailed to be fertilized in an apiary of select 

 drones. It would seem that the United 

 States is rich enough to provide some such 

 stations, and a request by the National As- 

 sociation might secure it. 



If not. surely a number of members of the 

 Association might be found who would take 

 sufficient interest in the matter to subscribe 

 a small sum each, and establish a mating 

 station on some isolated point, where a 

 small apiary could be kept consisting of 

 colonies bred from queens that showed not 

 less than 150-pound record. Two or ^ years 

 of selective breeding in such a yard should 

 work wonders. 



This surely is a matter of vast inipor- 

 tance, and the suggestion that it be 

 brought up for consideration, and per- 

 haps for action, at the next National 

 convention is very sane. The one 

 thing that more than anything else 

 stands in the way of permanent im- 

 provement in bees is the fact that male 

 parentage can not be controlled, but 

 must be left to chance. A bee-keeper 

 may buy the best queen in the world, 

 rear young queens from her, and those 

 young queens, for anything that he can 

 do, may mate with scrub drones from 

 some surrounding apiary. Look at the 

 frantic efforts that have been made to 

 control mating by erecting huge tents, 

 or otherwise. No small amount of 

 money has been spent in this way, and 

 more would be cheerfully spent if suc- 

 cess could be made certain. 



When one comes to think about it, it 

 does seem that bee-keepers go at the 

 matter of breeding bees wrong end to. 

 When a dairyman wants to improve his 

 herd, if he is financially able, he buys 

 the best bull he can obtain. To be 

 sure, he mav buy one or more cows of 

 the right stock, but the bull is the main 

 thing. So it is with the sheep-breeder, 

 the poultry-breeder — in fact, with the 

 breeder of anv kind of live stock ex- 



