CHAPTER IX. 



HIVE FOR REARING QUEEN BEES. 



BEE keeping, conducted upon advanced principles, 

 requires the bee keeper to provide himself with a 

 supply of fertile queen bees during the working 

 season. These are introduced into stocks that 

 have been swarmed by art, in order to supply the 

 place of the queen taken from them ; or, in the 

 case of natural swarms, to save the time very 

 precious during the honey-flow that would elapse 

 before the immature queens left on the departure 

 of the first swarm arrive at maturity, and take up 

 the maternal duty of keeping up the working popu- 

 lation of the hive, or of the new colonies which 

 the secondary swarm or swarms originate. They 

 will also be needed to enable the bee keeper to 

 carry out certain other objects he may contem- 

 plate, such as the supersession of queens whose 

 powers are declining through age, or which lack 

 the desirable qualities good queens possess. 



The rearing of queens is then an important 

 matter with bee keepers who have apiaries of more 

 than a few stocks of bees. The work is usually 

 done by setting apart several small colonies of 

 bees obtained by the division of full-sized stocks. 

 The queens are reserved, so that the colonies are 

 queenless, and in each of these queenless colonies 

 a selected queen cell eight or nine days old is 

 placed. A few days after the queen will arrive at 

 maturity and liberate herself from the cell, and at 

 a later stage, if all goes well, she will be found 

 busily employed laying eggs, and receiving the 

 attentions of her subjects. As soon as the bee 

 keeper is assured of the queen's fertility by the 



