90 



THE AMERICAN APICULTURIST. 



[Copyright.] 



THIRTY YEARS AMONG THE BEES. 



Bt Henry Alley. 



QUEEN-REARING. 



\_Continued from page li, Vol. viii.] 



Knife for cutting comb foundation and re- 

 moving queen cells. 



A knife of the right kind is not the 

 least of the convenient and important 

 things to have in the bee-room and in 

 the apiary generally. I have several 

 old, well-worn table knives that I use 

 about the apiary, mostly in our queen- 

 rearing operations. A suitable knife 

 should not have a blade too thick, and 

 I may say that it is impossible to get one 

 with a blade that will be too thin. 



Keep at hand a lighted lamp for 

 heating the knife, as it does much better 

 •work when quite warm than when cold. 

 Always heat the knife when it is used 

 about queen cells, or in any queen-rear- 

 ing operations. It is often necessary to 

 separate queen cells when they are built 

 in clusters. If a cold knife is used to do 

 such work, there is great danger of in- 

 juring one or more of the cells, and of 

 destroying the queens in them. Heat 

 the knife just hot enough to have it cut 

 smoothly- 

 Screening drones from worker bees. 



It is often necessary in rearing queens 

 to separate the drones from worker 

 bees. During my queen-rearing oper- 

 ations, I have practised such work a 

 great deal. This, of course, was neces- 

 sary before the introduction of the 

 drone-and-queen trap. Before the in- 

 vention of this useful device for ridding 

 the apiary of useless and undesirable 

 drones, other means had to be de- 

 vised for destroying them, as black 

 drones were not to be tolerated in the 

 same apiary with young Italian queens. 

 In those days of our early queen-rearing 

 experience, we were obliged to run an 



out-apiary of nucleus colonies on ac- 

 count of the liability of the races mix- 

 ing. With the drone-and-queen trap, 

 several races can be kept in the same 

 yard and none will hybridize. 



I believe every reader of this under- 

 stands that queens and drones mate in 

 the air and twt in the hive. When a 

 queen is five days old she will, , if the 

 weather is pleasant, take her first flight 

 to meet a drone. If not successful the 

 first day, she will fly each succeeding 

 pleasant day until she is fertilized. Al- 

 though I have been rearing queens by 

 the thousands the past thirty years, I 

 never yet knew a queen to make the 

 mating flight when under five days of 

 age. I have read accounts where it is 

 claimed that queens were fertilized when 

 less than four days old. I have tried 

 every means to induce queens to take a 

 flight when under five days old, but was 

 unsuccessful in each case. 



Queen-cell protsctors. 



The queen-cell protector is a thing 

 of which I know but little. I be- 

 lieve Mr. Doolittle claims the invention 

 of this novel device for preventing 

 queens from destroying queen-cells. 

 Rather than use an arrangement of this 

 kind, it seems to me that it would be a 

 much better plan to remove the queen- 

 cells from the combs and place them 

 in nursery-cages. If queens are allowed 

 to hatch in nursery- cages, they can re- 

 main in them until introduced. 



I do not advise the use of the queen 

 nursery, or the use of the nursery-cage 

 when the cell can be placed in a queen- 

 less colony. 



