3^0 



THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW 



established principles of queen rear- 

 ing-, may be one of those short lived 

 affairs whose da3's are soon numbered, 

 yet, if she comes from the right stock, 

 her bees, whatever may be the number 

 of which she becomes the mother, are 

 just as good bees as can be produced. In 

 other words, there is no system of 

 queen rearing that will improve a 

 strain of bees. Tr}' and not inisunder- 

 stand me. To be sure, we must have 

 queens that are sufficiently prolific to 

 keep the brood nests full of brood at a 

 time of the year when this is desirable; 

 and possessed of a longevity that will 

 enable them to perform this feat two or 

 more seasons; having this, what more 

 is needed ? As a rule, the honey pro- 

 ducer need trouble his head very little 

 about the rearing of queens. The 

 bees will attend to that, and rear just 

 as good queens as are needed. If his 

 queens don't fill the brood-nests in the 

 required season, how much more prac- 

 tical to simply reduce the size of his 

 brood-nests until the queens do fill 

 them, instead of ransacking the earth 

 for more prolific queens, or else by 

 twisting, turning, and shifting about 

 of combs, endeavor to make one queen 

 lay an increased number of eggs. 



As I look at the matter, in the light 

 in which I am discussing it, the queen 

 is simply the vehicle of transmission 

 from one generation to another. It is 

 the qualities to be transmitted, rather 

 than the vehicle of transmission, that 

 should receive our attention. To illus. 

 trate: A man has a strain of bees that 

 are of little value as honey gatherers. 

 Can he, by any sort of "jugglery" at 

 queen rearing, transform them into en- 

 erg-ectic workers ? Something might 

 be done in the way of selection, but 

 not by methods of queen rearing. 



Bee-keepers often tell how much 

 better are the bees from the queen se- 

 cured from this breeder than from the 

 queen bought of some other breeder; or 

 that the bees from the daughter of a 

 queen from a certain breeder are 



superior to bees from the daughters of 

 some other queen, and have argued 

 from this that the queens, and the 

 manner in which they were reared, 

 caused the diff'erence in results. I say 

 no. The difference is in the strain of 

 bees, and not in the manner in which 

 the queens were reared. 



That there are circumstances in 

 which much depends upon the queen it 

 is idle to dispute. Some of our best 

 bee-keepers have argued against extra 

 prolificness in queens, some of them 

 even going so far as to assert that pro- 

 lificness in the queen is at the expense 

 of quality in the bees; but that prolific- 

 ness is all inportant to the user of 

 larg'e brood-nests cannot be dodged. 

 He must have prolific queens, else one 

 half of his brood chamber is trans- 

 formed into a store-room. But this 

 extra prolificness is not secured by 

 some peculiar method of queen rearing, 

 but by selection — by rearing queens 

 from the colonies having the most pro- 

 lific queens. Here, again, the queen is 

 simply the vehicle for transmitting the 

 qualit}^ of prolificness from one gener- 

 ation to the other. 



The age of queens may also have 

 some bearing upon success. Where 

 the harvest ends with white clover, 

 more surplus will be secured if the 

 bees do hot swarm; and colonies with 

 young queens are far less likely to 

 swarm. Then, again, young queens lay 

 much later in the fall, and this has a 

 bearing upon the subject of wintering, 

 as also does the time when they begin 

 la3'ing in the spring. 



As I have already said, we need 

 queens sufficiently prolific to fill the 

 brood -nests with eggs at the season of 

 the year when this is desirable, and 

 possessed of a reasonable amount of 

 longevity. This secured, nothing 

 more needs consideration except the 

 stock from which they come. Naturally, 

 when a man buys a queen, he expects 

 to get the worth of his money. If he 

 buys her to rear queens from, he ex- 



