THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW 



11 



By sorting- out the yellowish queens of the first cross, letting 

 them mate with Italian drones, then waiting until their workers 

 come out full grown, then sorting again, and no one can tell how 

 many queens were raised from that mismated black queen and 

 sorted out. At that time, remember, I had the only hive of Italian 

 bees known within 35 miles. That was Bridgeport, Conn. Two 

 other hives had been in Litchfield county, but had been handled to 

 death, so they did not live through the season. Under those cir- 

 cumstances I was not guessing at results because I did find out to 

 the certainty for three years just how far off the black queens did 

 meet with the Italian drones. I had the sure proof that black queens 

 meeting Italian drones produced good working bees, and I also 

 learned, as did lots of others, that the black drone mating can, does 

 and will produce ugliness to calculate upon. 



In that second and third Ital- 

 ian drone mating starting with 

 queens from that Italian mated, 

 Amos Alitchel queen, I got 

 hives of bees showing nearly 

 all of the workers evenly 

 striped with yellow bands. Not 

 leather, ochre, mahogany or 

 tan color, but clear bright yel- 

 low color banded bees. From 

 that crossing I obtained the 

 first yellow workers or queens 

 that i ever saw. And in 1876 

 and '17 I was selling plenty of 

 yellow queens and also the 

 queens to produce the real yel- 

 low worker bees, (there are 

 people living that know of 

 them), but from Italian drones 

 on the black queen I accident- 

 ally hit a good-natured cross. 

 vSome others tried the black 

 drone as in the Dr. Bonney dia- 

 gram, and they got ugliness 

 where I obtained good nature in my accidental catch on to the cross 

 breeding. See? 



I have for years noticed plainly that the Italian drone mated to 

 other varieties would be as a rule very satisfactorily good, but on 

 the reverse they were ugly enough. 



And drones raised from the queens of the third or fourth gen- 

 eration of stock from that black drone cross do show a cross dis- 



EXTRACT FROM A POPULAR NOVEL. 



' There tvas a cry of despair as he sank into his seat 



