American Bee Journal. 



EDITED AND PUBLISHED BY SAMUEL WAGNER, WASHINGTON, D. C. 



AT TWO DOLLARS PER ANNUM, PAYABLE IN ADVANCE. 



Vol. IV. 



SEPTEMBER, 18G8. 



No. 3. 



[From the German.] 



Practical Bee-Culture. 

 Reserve Queens. 



Almost every bee-keeper knows from ex- 

 perience how vexatious a matter it is when col- 

 onies, old or young, become queenless, and 

 how troublesome and difficult a task it ofttimes 

 is to re-queen them. Yet, theoretically, it 

 would seem that the occurrence should cause 

 no trouble, nor give us any uneasiness. " Give 

 the suffering colony* sealed queen cell," we 

 are taught, " or insert a piece of suitable brood- 

 comb, and it will soon provide itself with a 

 queen again." The doctrine is all right; but, 

 alas, in practice, the work of "reconstruction" 

 does not always run on just so smoothly. 



Let us take a cursory view of the cases in 

 which queenlessness occurs. 



First. A colony becomes queenless, from no 

 fault or act of its owner, at a time when neither 

 queen cells nor brood from which a queen 

 might be reared are to be found, or when no 

 drones exist to fertilize the young queen when 

 mature. 



Second. Queenlessness occurs, whether by 

 the owner's action or interference or not, at a 

 time when brood abounds and drones are plen- 

 tiful enough. A natural swarm may issue and 

 lose its queen ; or we multiply by artificial 

 metbods, division or transposition, and thereby 

 produce queenlessness in at least one of the col- 

 onies operated on ; or we remove the queen of 

 a colony while pasturage is abundant, to cause 

 an accumulation of stores without interference 

 from brood, and desire when rc-qucening it to 

 substitute a young queen for the old one ; or, 

 finally, queens are lost on their wedding flight, 

 or from various other obvious or supposable 

 causes. 



In the first case above stated, re-queening by 

 means of a queen cell or brood comb is either 

 quite impossible or so uncertain that the best 

 practitioners advise against attempting it — 

 deeming it far better to break up the unfortu- 

 nate colony at once. 



This case occurs not merely in the spring or 

 fall, but not unfrequcntly in the height of sum- 



mer ; for when a queen is lost on her wedding 

 flight there is usually no more brood in her 

 hive from which a successor could be reared. 

 In the remaining cases, indeed, re-queening by 

 means of queen cells or brood, is not only a 

 possible, but the natural process, (even if it be ef- 

 fected with the aid of the bee-keeper) ; though 

 most apiarians have often found, from sad ex- 

 perience, that after much anxiety and delay, 

 the result is a failure. 



Even when all things concur to secure a 

 favorable issue, a month and more may pass 

 before a queen raised from brood will begin to 

 lay, and another month before the young bees 

 produced from her eggs will become active 

 workers. Meanwhile the season of pasturage 

 is passing away, and when the new generation 

 is ready to work there is nothing for them to 

 gather. This is the reason why, in districts 

 having spring or summer pasturage only, old 

 stocks that have swarmed late, and late second 

 swarms, usually fail to secure sufficient stores 

 for winter, even if they do not happen to lose 

 their queens, and become the prey of swarms. 



But matters do not always move on so regu- 

 larly and systematically, as theory teaches or 

 leads us to expect. Old stocks that have 

 swarmed, and artificial colonies supplied with 

 brood, sometimes fail to start queen cells ; or if 

 they do, and succeed in rearing them, the 

 young queens not unfrequently are lost on their 

 wedding llight. In such case, the earliest and 

 most important three or four weeks of their 

 brief allotted season, are already lost ; the work 

 has to be begun anew, and possibly we may 

 have the gratification at the end of ten or twelve 

 weeks, to see young workers returning to their 

 hive laden w'th pollen. Much precious time 

 has been fruitlessly wasted ; many fine combs 

 of brood have been unprofitably sacrificed ; 

 thousands of workers have been hatched merely 

 to become mere unproductive laborers ; and the 

 end of the whole is that a feeble colony has 

 been laboriously built up simply to be united 

 in the fall with some other one equally feeble, 

 in the hope of thus saving them from destruc- 

 tion otherwise obviously inevitable. 



These are the experiences which have given 

 many a bee-keeper a dislike for every kind of 

 multiplication, whether by natural or artificial 



