THE AMEIUCAN APIGULTUlilbT. 



223 



l)reparetl. Two combs, one of which 

 should contain several pounds of honey, 

 and a (luantity of fresh pollen are placed 

 in the hive. One must be certain that 

 there are no eggs or larvse in any of the 

 cells of the combs used, as if even one 

 cell contains an egg the bees will cer- 

 tainly utilize it from which to rear a 

 queen, and if a young larva is present 

 in any cell, a queen would most likely be 

 reared from that. If a queen is reared 

 from the latter she would be likely to 

 " hatch " several days before the queens 

 are due that would be reared from the 

 eggs given. The result would be the de- 

 struction of all the cells built from the 

 eggs placed in the hive, unless they were 

 removed several days before they are 

 matured sufficiently to be handled with 

 safety. 



This illustrates the difficulty that is 

 sure to attend the operations of a care- 

 less person who undertakes queen rear- 

 ing. Such a person ought not to adopt 

 the bee business, anyway. 



If the same combs are used in the 

 cell-building hives all the season, there 

 will be no danger of "unknown" eggs in 

 them. 



Do bees remove eggs from one cell to 

 another? 



It is often said that bees remove eggs 

 from one cell to another, and from one 

 comb to another, and then rear queens 

 from such eggs. I am certain nothing 

 of the kind ever has happened in my 

 apiary, and it seems to me that no bees 

 ever have had a greater opportunity to 

 remove eggs and thus prove tlie cor- 

 rectness of such statements than I have 

 given them in my methods of queen 

 rearing the past quarter of a century. 



I have never known the bees to con- 

 struct queen cells except from the eggs 

 given them and in the location they 

 were placed. The old and common- 

 place methods for rearing queens as 

 given in nearly all the bee papers and 

 standard works on bee culture of the 

 present day are well known to those who 

 take an interest in bee matters, and I 

 need not repeat them here, and certainly 



will not unjustly criticise them. Those 

 methods were the best and most prac- 

 tical known until within a few years. 

 Many dealers in queens practise them 

 to-day and seem to succeed to a certain 

 extent, yet they were not satisfactory to 

 me nor could I rear queens by them in 

 sufficient numbers to fill the orders that 

 would come in by every mail. Then 

 again, the cost in bees and labor b}' 

 those methods was an item worth con- 

 sidering, and I found most too much 

 night work to suit me about those an- 

 cient ways of producing queens. 



Building cells in clusters. 

 As a matter of course the reader un- 

 derstands that by such methods queen 

 cells are built in clusters as illustrated 



in fisfure 



And it must be evident 



V IG > Thp old way ot hai mq cells built 



to all that it is impossible to separate 

 the cells built in that way without de- 

 stroying many of them. When this is 

 the case, how is it possible to rear 

 queens and make the business a suc- 

 cess? Here is another point that comes 

 up here. The number of queen cells 

 that are likely to be built is very uncer- 

 tain. A strong colony when properly 

 prepared to rear queens ])y the days- 

 gone-by methods may build five cells 

 and they may build a dozen cells, there 

 is always existing an uncertainty about 

 it, and those who rear queens by the old 



