July. mm. 



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American l^ee JonrnaTjl 



227 



■<<^^. 



beginners who are not familiar with 

 the practices of the veteran, and it is 

 for their benefit that this article is 

 prepared. 



The first essential, of course, is a 

 pure queen to serve as a breeder. If 

 one has none, a good one should be 

 bought from a queen-breeder who has 

 desirable stock. As a rule it is not 

 indispensable to buy tested queens, 

 since two or three untested queens 

 can be bought for the price of a select 

 tested one, and if one buys from a con- 

 scientious breeder the untested queens 

 seldom prove disappointing. However, 

 they must be tested before using them 

 as breeders. 



BEullEENINC A WHOLE APIARV FROM ONE 

 rURE nUEEN. 



With one purely mated Italian queen 

 it is quite possible to requeen a whole 

 apiary of ordinary bees and have them 

 all practically pure Italians at the end 

 of two or three years. If the bee- 

 keeper has 100 colonies it will be neces- 

 sary to rear as many queens and replace 

 the hybrids already in the hives. The 



young queens will of course be pure 

 stock, but since many will mate with 

 the hybrid drones their workers will all 

 be crosses also. However, we now 

 know that the mating of a queen does 

 not affect her male offspring, and if 

 her mother was purely mated all her 

 drones will be pure. Thus we will 

 have thousands of pure Italian drones 

 within a few months. If the first 

 queens are reared early in the spring, a 

 second lot can be reared from the 

 purely mated mother in August or Sep- 

 tember and used to replace those of 

 the first ones which are impurely 

 mated. By this time most of the drones 

 present will be pure Italians, so that 

 the percentage of purely mated queens 

 will be large. If the first lot are not 

 reared in time to be replaced the same 

 season it can be done the following 

 spring. A little later on a third lot 

 can be reared to replace such as are 

 not purely mated and thus we have the 

 whole apiary Italianized with little out- 

 lay except the time necessary. 

 If the beekeeper thinks he can afford 



it, he will buy several good queens to 

 begin with and will rear as many 

 drones as possible from those which he 

 does not use for producing queencells. 

 To rear plenty of drones in a good 

 season is not difficult. It is only neces- 

 sary to place drone-combs in the cen- 

 ter of the brood-chamber. The greater 

 difilculty is in preventing the rearing 

 of drones in colonies that are undesir- 

 able as breeders. To do this in early 

 spring, we remove the drone-comb 

 from those colonies and replace it with 

 worker-comb. In spite of all you can 

 do, some drones will be reared in cor- 

 ners. But the processes indicated will 

 greatly increase the possibility of pure 

 matings. 



REARING THE IJUEENS. 



The cell-cup or Doolittle method of 

 rearing queens will not be touched in 

 this article. He who wants to rear 

 queens in large numbers had best 

 secure the Doolittle book. We exhibit 

 the cell-cups and the matured cells only 

 to show the method as compared to the 

 natural wav. 



GETTING A LOT OF QUEEN-CELLS ON A FRAME BY DR. MILLER'S METHOD 



