THE AMERICAN APICULTURIST. 



149 



ty-four hours before they slioiild hatch. 

 This we practised the last two months 

 of this season. Novv if Mr.Doolittle 

 will manage to transfer an egg instead 

 of a larva he will hit the nail squarely 

 on the head. Why not try it Brother 

 D.? We do not practise the DooliLtle 

 method of rearing queens, but what a 

 wonderful improvement there would 

 be in the Doolittle methods and also in 

 queens reai-ed by those methods, if 

 Mr. D. and his followers will practise 

 our suggestions. Mr. D. has given us 

 a fine book on queen-rearing, yet his 

 methods are as far from perfection as 

 those given by many other queen 

 breeders. 



An old customer. 



Our old friend, J. Huhnan, of Terre 

 Haute, Indiana, ordered some queens 

 to-day and sa3's, "■! have bought queens 

 of you for 20 years." He is correct, 

 I think we have sent Frientl H. more 

 or less queens each year for twenty- 

 five years. 1 hope we shall continue to 

 do business together for twenty-five 

 years more. I shall need that num- 

 ber of more years in order to get rich 

 at the queen rearing business. It is 

 pretty hard work, and very small pay 

 and sooner or later those fellows who 

 are advertising queens for sale at such 

 low prices will find that they cannot 

 be reared at a profit for so small a 

 sum. 



I saw the advertisement in a bee- 

 paper of a man who is ottering tested 

 queens at $1.00 each. That man does 

 not know a pure queen from a hybrid ; 

 yet some one will be so foolish as to 

 send him a dollar for one of his test- 

 ed ( ?) queens. 



Italians vs. Carniolan bees. 

 Mr. S. A. Shuck has an article in 

 the American Bee Journal giving his 

 experience with the Carniolan bees 

 in which I was much interested. Mr. 

 Shuck hits one J. C. Robinson some 

 pretty hard raps. The article is well 

 written and will prove quite interest- 



ing to those who have the Carniolan 

 bees. We are so well pleased with 

 the good advice Mr. Shuck gave the 

 readers of the A. B. J. concerning the 

 Italian bees, that we quote his words 

 below, 



I wish to say to the iuexperienced bee- 

 keeper, that if he has bees that he knows 

 wall gather houey when there is honey to 

 be gathered, the best thing he can do is to 

 take good care of his bees. If he wants 

 bees that are gentle — bees that he may 

 know are, pure, both by their appearance 

 and actions — just send to any reliable 

 breeder of Italian bees for a few tested 

 queens ; and, take my word for it, yon will 

 not be disappointed. 



I wonder if Mr. S. had the fifty- 

 cent queen dealers in his mind when 

 he penned the above. 



While I am on the subject of Carni- 

 olan bees, I may as well say something 

 more about them. I have found them 

 very good honey gatherers and quite 

 gentle. These are their best points. 



One word about the purity of these 

 bees. I had one queen in 1889 whose 

 worker progeny in color were all a 

 "steel blue." A great many of her 

 daughters were of a muddy-white col- 

 or. I selected some of the finest and 

 lightest queens for breeding queens. 

 But when the brood hatched from 

 these queens about half of the workers 

 were 3'ellow-banded ; in fact it was 

 very friuch so with the worker bees 

 from the darkest queens. As the 

 drones were reared from the same 

 queen that the daughter came from, 

 I su[)posed that some of the latter 

 would give purely marked Carniolan 

 bees. The worker bees were all yellow- 

 banded. Out of one hundred queens 

 reaied, not one gave purely marked 

 bees equal to those of the mother, 

 though all the queens were fertilized 

 two miles from all other bees, and at 

 the time there were thousands of Car- 

 niolan drones in the same yard with 

 the queens. Now please don't waste 

 your time in trying to prove that all the 

 young Carniolan queens were mated to 

 Italian drones. 1 know that not even 

 one of them was mismated. 



