10 



THE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER. 



Januarif 



approach of the main honey flow to 

 its end I would not disturb the reign- 

 ing queen of a colony that I Avas 

 working comb honey. Any slack in 

 egg-laying allows the workers to take 

 the advantage by storing honey in the 

 brood nest, and once they get the 

 start of the queen , the colony is ruin- 

 ed for honey purposes. 



The poiut as to which is preferable, 

 buying or rearing queens is something 

 that each bee-keeper must decide for 

 himself. If the owner of fifty colonies 

 does not propose to do any other work 

 during the working season except tak- 

 ing care of his bees, he will certainly 

 have abundant time in which to rear 

 his queens. If he has some other 

 work whereby he is earning good 

 wages, and the bees are a sort of side- 

 issue, it will probably be cheaper and 

 better to buy the queens in the fall. 



If the queens are to be reared, how 

 shall the work be done ? I must con- 

 fess that I never have been called up- 

 on to Italianize an apiary of fifty col- 

 onies, rearing my own queens, but I 

 think that I should goat it in some- 

 thing this fashion : Early in the 

 spring I should buy two tested Italian 

 queens aud introduce them to two of 

 the colonies, allowing these colonies a 

 great abundance of drone comb. I 

 should then examine all the other col- 

 onies, cutting out the drone combs 

 and replacing it with worker comb. 

 Of course, the bees will crovvd in a 

 few drone cells in corners, but, by us- 

 ing queen aud drone traps any stray 

 drone can be caught, and I would like 

 the traps anyway to catch the queens 

 when the bees swarm. When a hive 

 contains a young queen nearly old 

 enough to mate, the trap must be re- 

 moved until she has flown, This 



will occasionlly liberate a few drones, 

 perhaps, but they will pe so outnumb- 

 ered by the Italian drones that but 

 few queens will be mismated — perhaps 

 none. 



When the honey harvest is well 

 under way I would remove the queens 

 from two populous colonies. In about 

 three days I would place a nice, clean, 

 drv, worker comb, not more than a 

 year or two old, in the center of each 

 of ray colonies containing the Italian 

 queens. About the time that all of 

 the brood is sealed in the colonies de- 

 prived of their queens, the eggs will 

 just be hatching in the combs givea 

 to the Italian queens. I would then, 

 cut out all of the queen cells that had 

 been built in the queenless colonies^ 

 giving the combs of just hatching 

 larvpe. Cutting a few holes in the 

 comb just where the larvje are be- 

 ginning to hatch will greatly increase 

 the number of cells built. Two or 

 three days before the queens were 

 ready to hatch I would start as many 

 nuclei as there were cells. This I 

 would do by taking a single comb of 

 bees and brood from a colony and 

 placing it in a hive close by the side 

 of the hive from which it was taken, 

 and by the side of the comb I would 

 place an empty comb. The next day 

 I would cut out the cells and give 

 them to the nuclei, giving the queen- 

 less colonies another comb of eggs 

 from which to build another batch of 

 cells with which I would start more 

 nuclei. If I found it necessary to 

 start more cells 1 should give the cell- 

 building colonies more bees by shak- 

 ing them from the combs of other col- 

 onies, or else by taking a queen from 

 a swarm and dividing the bees be- 

 tween the two colonies. When these 



