GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



Bees have no lack of clover near Union Center, Wis. Photographed by Mrs. G. W. Barge. 



as we expected, no cells were accepted. 

 Then I tried putting a drop of water into 

 each cell before transferring the larv«. The 

 surface viscosity made it possible to float 

 the larvae as upon the royal jelly; but only 

 four out of fifteen cells were accepted. I 

 decided that there was probably too much 

 water in the cells, so I tried another stick 

 with the bottoms of the cells just dampened 

 with water; but again only four cells were 

 accepted. About this time the School Girl 

 decided that experimenting made too much 

 work for the results in the way of cells 

 accepted : and as there was now plenty of 

 royal jelly I had no excuse for trying any 

 thing else. We know, however, that, al- 

 though the royal jelly may be made as thin 

 as milk, clear water is not satisfactory. 



VARIATION IN THE ACCEPTING OF CELLS. 



We found a great variation in the enthu- 

 siasm with which different colonies accepted 

 our artificial cells. Some would habitually 

 accept a dozen or more out of fifteen cells, 

 while others would, time after time, give 

 only three or four accepted cells. We soon 

 learned not to blame ourselves for this, but 

 to discard the lazy ones and retain as cell- 

 starting colonies only those that accepted a 

 big majority of the cells given, 



We found that two good cell-starting 

 colonies and a nursery would furnish about 

 as many cells each day as one woman should 

 handle. It is a great temptation, during 

 the first few days, when the work consists 

 only of cell-starting, to prepare a gi'eat 

 number of cells; but finding and killing 

 queens is the hard part of the work, and 

 the part that limits progress; and as a 

 woman should not try to find and kill moi'e 

 than twenty queens in a day, many more 

 cells than that coming on each day would be 

 a superfluity. There is no time for starting 

 nuclei when the work consists of killing 

 queens, introducing cells to colonies made 

 queenless previously and starting more cells. 



Dequeening should begin about five days 

 after the first artificial cells are started, so 

 that a ripe cell may be introduced in a 

 protector, and the queen hatched before any 

 of the natural cells in the hive have pro- 

 duced virgins ready to make trouble. By 

 this plan the virgin from the artificial cell 

 hatches late enough to be accepted by the 

 bees, and yet in time to tear down the 

 natural cells. Since the honey-flow was 

 becoming slack when we commenced work, 

 we were not bothered by having swarms go 

 ofl with our carefully reared virgins, as we 



