52 



THE AMERICAN APICULTURIST. 



for the past two years purchased 

 of me wliat hybrid queens I hap- 

 pened to have on hand in the 

 spring", though he has never been 

 the man to order an Italian queen 

 of me. As to the relative points 

 of value between bees here in the 

 south : there never has been any 

 bee that is superior to the American 

 (Albino?) Italians. Yes, Ameri- 

 can. Why not American Italians? 

 Certainly there is a great improve- 

 ment made in the markings of the 

 queens, drones and workers, in any 

 strain of pure Italians that have 

 been bred up here on our American 

 continent for ten or twenty years 

 to the exclusion of imported stock, 

 that they are in no way Italian.^ ex- 

 cept from the fact that the bee was 

 originall}' from Italy? Any more 

 so than many of the American 

 people to-day, who all as a rule 

 originated from some other coun- 

 tr}', but are to-day Americans and ' 

 wh}' would not the same rule apply 

 to bees, friend Taylor? more es- 

 pecially since in every way, except 

 their originality the true American 

 Italian is foreign to the imported 

 Italian stock. In this I can agree 

 with Mr. Alley. 



Take the black bees in the south, 

 and the first thing they do is to fill 

 up every nook and corner of brood- 

 hive with brood and honey and then 

 swarm, many times without so much 

 as entering the sections. Then a- 

 gain the}^ till them one-fifth or one- 

 fourth, sometimes less, and then 

 swarm ; the result is, all bees and 

 no comb hone}'. And this dis- 

 position is most prominent in the 

 Germans and Italians crossed as 

 applied here. With pure Italians 

 they at once enter the sections and 

 go to work and fill them, removing 

 in many instances^ all the honey 

 from the brood-ciiambers, except a 

 little at each end of frames, and 

 have brood right to the top-bar of 

 frame. I never liad a hive of pure 

 Italians sivarm till after the sur- 



plus department vfasjillecl; that is 

 their strong point Here, which is 

 more than I can say for any other 

 strain or race of bees, and I iiave 

 kept during the past four years Cy- 

 prians, Syrians, Carniolans, Ital- 

 ians and Albino Italians. The same 

 remarks that apply to Italians are 

 applicable to golden or Albino 

 Italians, their most striking differ- 

 ence being in their markings. 

 Goldshoro, N. C. 



For the American Apiculturist. 



BOW TO REAR GOOD 

 QUEENS. 



C. M. GOODSPKED. 



I once heard L. C. Root say that 

 "beekeeping of to-day was a success 

 or failure according as the apiarist 

 had good or bad queens in each 

 colony." Competition is so severe 

 and prices of honey have been 

 forced down to so low a point that 

 beekeepers can no longer make the 

 business profitable unless tliey secure 

 full crops, and full crops are impos- 

 sible without strong colonies at the 

 opening of the harvest, and strong 

 colonies are equally out of the ques- 

 tion without good queens. 



Bees in a normal condition rear 

 their queens from queen eggs. What 

 I mean by "queen eggs" is eggs that 

 from the time they were laid were 

 intended to produce queens. I have 

 claimed that worker and queen eggs 

 were identical, but in the light of to- 

 day I dare not say they are. An egg 

 laid in a queen cup or full-sized cell 

 always stands perpendicular with the 

 base of the cell, while an egg laid 

 in a worker cell always (or nearly 

 always) leans a httle to one side. If 

 you will carefully remove an egg laid 

 in a queen cell and place it side by 

 side with a worker egg from the same 



