246 



THE AMERICAN APICULTURIST. 



not find the entrance to the small 

 hives when they are partly hidden 

 in the grass. Then again, it is 

 often necessary to " vamp up " the 

 small hives with bees. This is easily 

 and quickly done by dumping a 

 pint of bees down in front of the 

 hive and they soon run in, but if 

 they had to climb up a foot or more 

 to reach tlie entrance many bees 

 would take wing and rofeber bees 

 would be there also. 



BEES MARKING LOCATION. 



Mr. Doolittle has had consid- 

 erable to say about painting hives 

 and marking them so that when 

 the queens and bees take a flight 

 they* will be sure and return to the 

 right iiive. My opinion is, that 

 bees do not and cannot distinguish 

 between one color and another, — 

 color blind, perhaps. Tiie bees 

 seem to mark the location by the 

 surroundings more than by color. 

 The visitor who comes to my yard 

 does not find my hives, especially 

 the nucleus hives, all placed in 

 rows and everything up in fine ship- 

 shape order as the fancy beekeeper 

 has things. Should my nuclei be 

 arranged in rows as some people 

 who do not understand think they 

 should, not one queen in a dozen 

 would enter the right hive on her 

 return after a fliglit. Therefore, 

 my hives look as though they might 

 have been shot into my yard from 

 the mouth of a big gun. Well, 

 we never lose a queen by her mis- 

 taking the hive, though it would 

 seem to a stranger that not one bee 

 in the yard could find its home as 

 the ground is so completely cov- 

 ered hy small hives. The location 

 and position of the hives make it 

 an easy matter for the bees and 

 queens to know their own home. 



IN-BREEDING. 



Not one drone has been reared 

 from the queens that are used as 

 queen mothers, and not one queen 



has been reai'ed from the drone 

 mother, so you see there is no in- 

 breeding in our apiary. 



THE TRADE IN QUEENS. 



Orders for queens come to hand 

 eveiy month during the year, l)ut 

 the shipping season is from April 

 to Oct. 20. We ship more queens 

 between Aug. 1 and Oct. 1 than 

 from April 1 to Aug. 1. Hundreds 

 of beekeepers discover late in the 

 fall that some of their colonies are 

 queenless. Then, again, the month 

 of September is a good time in 

 which to renew queens. It is all bosh 

 to say a queen cannot be success- 

 fully introduced unless the bees 

 are gathering honey. Introduce 

 by the three-day method, and it 

 will make not one particle of dif- 

 ference when you introduce queens. 



BEES ROBBING. 



Although we have such a large 

 number of small colonies in our 

 apiary and from thirty to fifty full 

 colonies, we have not had one case 

 of robbing in our apiary this year, 

 notwithstai^ding that the natural 

 forage has been so scarce all the sea- 

 son. We feed mostly sugar, nothing 

 else to the nuclei, and do most of 

 the work in opening hives in a bee 

 house ; therefore we do not give the 

 bees any occasion to rob. When 

 w^e have had robbing, it is most eas- 

 ily checked by placing a strip of 

 glass over the entrance and com- 

 pelling all the bees to pass out at 

 one end of it. No robber bees dare 

 to enter, and if one happens to be 

 in the hive before the glass is used, 

 on his return to enter again it dis- 

 covers the obstruction and will 

 hesitate some time before it will 

 even attempt to pass through the 

 narrow aate. 



THE DRONE AND QUEEN-TRAP. 



[A coKitESPONDKNT wislies me to re- 

 port my experiments with tlie Alley 

 trap, as I promised last year I would 



