THE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER. 



27 



success. My bees have never paid me 

 so well as they did the past season. I 

 increased ray apiary to some extent 

 in t he usual way of hiving swarms, 

 but these gave me a very light profit 

 when compared with the double col- 

 onies, Thei'e is really no limit to the 

 manipulation of bees. I have obtain- 

 ed enormous yields of surplus from 

 siugle colonies by the following manip- 

 ulation: When a swarm issues remove 

 all the brood combs from the brood 

 chamber and fill it with empty combs, 

 graft a sealed queen cell into one of 

 the empty combs — a comb that con- 

 tains some honey is preferable, — now 

 adjust a perforated zinc queen exclud- 

 er on the brood chamber, put all the 

 combs of brood without disturbing 

 any of the queen cells that may he in 

 process of building, in a super and 

 adjust the super on the queen exclud- 

 er. The surplus cases are tiered on 

 tin.' super after the tiering-up fashion. 

 The swarm is now hived in the pre- 

 pared brood chamber under the queen 

 excluder, first taking their queen en- 

 tirely away from them. The queen 

 may be killed or used to start nuclei, 

 or you may sell her if she is a good 

 queen. When the .-warm is hived in 

 this way the bees act precisely as they 

 do when they loose their queen in an 

 attempt to swarm and return to the 

 parent hive. They simply settle down 

 to work and wait for the young brood 

 of queens to hatch, indulging j n gl . 

 rious expectation of a dead set at 

 swarming. But as they havebutone 

 queen cell in the brood department 

 this soon hatches and as the royal 

 Miss has no rival below the excluder, 

 she is mated in due time and all the 

 desires of the colony is realized. The 

 first queen that hatches above the ex- 



cluder will destroy all the cells and 

 she will be balled and < lest roved by 

 the bees, as she has no way to escape 

 from her prison. A colony managed 

 in this way is positively done swarm- 

 ing for the season, and it has strength 

 to gather an enormous yield of surplus. 

 And the fact that the bees have some 

 respite from brood rearing till the 

 young queen is ready to lay eggs gives 

 the colony additional advantages in 

 way of bending all their energies to- 

 ward storing surplus. This is what I 

 call my "queenless system." It will 

 be seen that my plan of working a 

 double colony through the honey har- 

 vest, and single at all other times, is 

 squarely antipodal to the "contrac- 

 tion system." 



I will put it against any other plan 

 to prevent increase and to secure a 

 paying crop of surplus. When prac- 

 ticing my double colony plan, the queen 

 may be hived with the bees, if she is 

 young and vigorous, but if she is old 

 and weak from any cause, further 

 swarming may be expected. When 

 practicing this plan the wings of the 

 queen should be clipped so as to read- 

 ily secure the queen when a swarm 

 issues. The clipping is done in the 

 early Spring. This plan is particu- 

 larly adapted to the production of 

 both comb ami extracted honey at the 

 same dine. I do not think it advisa- 

 ble for any apiarist to attempt to pro- 

 duce either comb or the extracted art- 

 icle alone. It is injurious to the mar- 

 ket interest to do so. If ail bee- 

 keepers have not learned, they will 

 find it out, that some seasons it is 

 nearly impossible to obtain a [lay- 

 ing crop of comb honey, when by 

 means of good, empty combs, honey 

 can lie taken with the extractor in 



