Published Monthly by The W. T. Falconer Mfg. Co. 



Vol. XII 



OCTOBER, 1902 



No. 10 



QUEEN REARING. 



Prejudice, Ignorance and Mis-Statcments the 



Rule in the Profession -Alley's System 



Championed. 



(Arthur C. Miller.) 



4^ 



SAVE at the spigot and waste at 

 the bung," quite aptly fits most 

 of the so-called economical sys- 

 tems of queen rearing now in vogue. 

 Each system has its champions, but un- 

 fortunately the discussion of the merits 

 of each has thus far been carried on al- 

 most entirely by those who have for 

 sale queens reared by the method they 

 are advocating, or who have for sale 

 implements for use in some system, or 

 both. Such evidence is of necessity 

 biased, and of little or no value to the 

 practical bee-keener who desires to get 

 at the meri'ts of the subject. 



Labor and time are used to make ar- 

 tificial cell-cups; much more time is 

 used to stock them with larvae, and all 

 to what purpose V That the queen cells 

 may "be built conveniently on a stick" 

 and that ''valuable combs may not be 

 mutilated." Could any seemingly plaus- 

 ible statements be more fallacious? 

 And those two statenrents are absolute- 

 ly the only ones used in defense of the 

 pernicious cell cup system of queen 

 rearing. 



At the invitation of Mr. Alley I re- 

 cently visited his apiary to inspect his 

 new system of queen rearing, and the 

 queens reared by it, and I will here try 

 to describe some of the features which 

 s:o to make his svstem the most thor- 



ough, complete, economical and effici- 

 ent of any now in use. 



His method of preparing the bees for 

 cell building is as given in his book, as 

 is also the keeping of his breeding queen 

 in a small hive and the stripping up of 

 the egg-filled combs for cell building, 

 l)Ut Irom that point on, many changes 

 have been made. Instead of fastening 

 the strips of cells to the lower edge of 

 a half comb, he now attaches them to 

 strips of wood and places several of 

 them in a frame just as is done with 

 artificial cells. The results are as good 

 as by ihe old way and the cells can be 

 removed with ease. This is particularly 

 so v/hen he leaves two vacant cells be- 

 tween those with aii egg. Regarding 

 the mutilation of combs to obtain eggs, 

 Mr. Alley had sulistantially this to say: 

 "Which is better for me, to strip up in 

 ten seconds a bit of comb four inches 

 square, costing nothing and furnishing 

 eggs for one hundred queens, or spend 

 many minutes and much good eyesight 

 transferring larvae from comb to cell 

 cups, just to save mutilating a piece of 

 comb? The comb costs me nothing; m\ 

 time is worth money. Those little combs 

 are built by otherwise useless bees, for 

 the little nuclei from which the queens 

 are fertilized will build combs in those 

 frames when otherwise they would be 

 of no value except as homes for the 

 young queens." But suppose he did not 

 use the small hive plan for his "stock" 

 queen, and instead had to cut into the 

 comb of a full L frame. Two cuts made 

 diagonally across the comb will remove 

 as many rows of cells as desired, and 

 the comb thus cut when returned to the 



