224 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



June 



headed by old queens. Later all this 

 nectar was consumed, and a little 

 feeding was done before the fall 

 flow began. The apiaries at Milli- 

 ken's and Holland's both experienced 

 a little flow, from white clover, which 

 was sufficient to carry them through 

 the month of June. The remaining 

 apiaries, Spencer, Poland and Le- 

 Maire, were heavily fed with sugar 

 syinip, and most colonies in those 

 apiaries were short of stores before 

 June 1. 



In beekeeping, perhaps as much or 

 more than in any other occupation, 

 the operator must know what to do 

 and do it in time. Even the older, 

 experienced beekeeper, cannot af- 

 ford to slight his bees at a time when 

 they need attention. An example of 

 this occurred at our Sack apiary, dur- 

 ing the middle of May, when 70 of 

 the 81 colonies were found on the 

 point of starvation. This shortage of 

 food had gone to such an extent that 

 not only had the queens ceased lay- 

 ing and no honey could be found in 

 the hives, but the bees had actually 

 killed all their drones and were un- 

 capping sealed worker brood, as well 

 as dragging out the larva. An ex- 

 perience of this kind, to amateurs, 

 might easily be mistaken for a bad 

 case of disease throughout an apiary. 

 In spite of this setback, however, this 

 apiary, upon being promptly fed, was 

 carried for two weeks, until the 

 honey flow from black locust came, 

 the latter pax-t of the same month. 

 Eventually, this apiary did very well 

 for the season, as the record testifies 

 10 barrels of nice fall honey har- 

 vested. 



Annual migration, for honey crops, 

 is not a common thing in the Missis- 

 sippi Valley, but is being practiced 

 with profit more and more in recent 

 years. 1919 was our first on a large 

 scale. To get full returns for the ef- 



fort and expense, bees must reach the 

 field in time to get the full benefit of 

 crop yield at the temporary location. 

 When the spi-ing of 1920 opened 

 the prospects were about the same as 

 the previous year. Considerable 

 moisture, however, brought about a 

 small flow of white clover, which 

 eventually turned out to be 12,000 

 pounds, half of the year's crop. Too 

 much moisture caused a late growth 

 of the producing weeds of the low- 

 lands and many of them did not ma- 

 ture before September. Added to 

 this drawback, a drought set in at the 

 time when nectar secretion should 

 have been at its best, and in that way 

 the fall crop for 1920 was cut in two. 



ECONOMY IN THE PRODUCTION 



OF QUEEN BEES 

 Part II. — Dry Grafting Into Artifi- 

 cial Wax Cups 



By Geo. D. Shafer 

 At least as early as 1888, and per- 

 haps before that, Doolittle had graft- 

 ed very young worker larvse directly 

 into "perfectly dry queen cells," and 

 had succeeded in having these accept- 

 ed and finished on the combs of a 

 colony preparing to swarm. When 

 he began using artificial cups of wax, 

 however, he followed the practice of 

 placing a portion of fresh royal jelly 

 (about the size of a BB shot, taken 

 from any unsealed queen-cell) in the 

 bottom of each cup, just before graft- 

 ing. By smearing the bottoms of ar- 

 tificial cups with royal jelly in this 

 way he found that a much larger pro- 

 portion of them would be accepted. 

 This practice of "wet grafting," as it 

 may be called, is generally recom- 

 mended by queen breeders and by 

 books on beekeeping. Pratt, how- 

 ever, claimed that his "Swarthmore 

 swarm-box" made it entirely unneces- 

 sary to place royal jelly in the cups 



The home-made cell-cup dipping machine of Mr. J. E. Wing, San Jose, Calif., used for dipping 

 48 cell-cups at one operation, "b," cell-stick board; "s," cell-sticks; "w p," wax pan; "f," 

 supporting frame for cell-stick board, "b," which is raised and lowered by turning "c." "d," 

 slot device for adjusting the supporting frame "f" quickly, so that the cell-sticks will dip 

 into the wax to the proper depth, as the work of dipping proceeds, and the melted wax is 

 gradually used from the wax pan. 



before grafting, and he did not fol- 

 low that practice. He saved time by 

 grafting directly from the worker- 

 cells into the dry artificial cell-cups, 

 and the bees in his swarm-box were 

 so eager to feed young larvae that 

 they accepted the little larvae in the 

 artificial cups and began feeding 

 them royal jelly at once. "Dry 

 grafting" in this manner is practiced 

 by Wing in preparing bars of cell 

 cups to be given his swarm-box hive, 

 with the same excellent results. In 

 "dry grafting" it must not be in- 

 ferred that the little larvae become 

 at all dry themselves during the 

 transfer, for such is not the case, if 

 proper larvae are taken. Huber es- 

 tablished the fact that larvae in 

 worker cells are fed with royal jelly 

 for about the first three days after 

 they hatch. Doolittle says (Page 29, 

 "Scientific Queen Rearing," Sixth edi- 

 tion) : "So far as I am able to judge, 

 the larva in a worker cell is sur- 

 rounded by three times the food it 

 can use for the first thii'ty-six hours 

 of its existence." This certainly 

 seems to be true in the case of all 

 worker larvae in colonies where there 

 are plenty of well-fed nurse bees. 

 In the "dry gi-afting" refeiTed to 

 here, only such larvae, about two days 

 old, surrounded in the worker cells 

 by an abundance of white royal jelly 

 are used. In taking up these larvae to 

 transfer them to the artificial cell- 

 cups, a goodly amount of the jelly is 

 taken up and transferred with the 

 larva to the cups. The little fellows 

 can sufl^er in no way, therefore, since 

 within a few minutes after the graft- 

 ing process they are being fed again 

 by the eager nurse bees in the swarm- 

 box hive. 



The artificial cell-cups of wax 

 used by Wing are home-made by dip- 

 ping — cups being obtained like those 

 described by Doolittle. These are 

 preferred, because the edges of the 

 cups are thinner than those of the 

 waxen cups made by compression — 

 more like the edges of queen-cells un- 

 der construction by the bees. In the 

 long run, he believes, the thin-edged 

 cells made by dipping yield a greater 

 proportion of large well-finished 

 queen-cells than the thicker edged, 

 shallower compressed cups. More- 

 over, he has learned how to make the 

 cups, by dipping on a large sca'e, just 

 as cheaply as the compressed cups 

 may be turned out. Forty-eight of 

 the usual cell-sticks are nested 'n a 

 board (9x14 inches) so that all the 

 sticks may be dipped into water at 

 the same time and then into a pan of 

 melted wax, uniformly, five or six 

 times. The machine shown in the 

 accompanying figures makes it possi- 

 ble to raise and lower the nest of cell- 

 sticks uniformly by simply turning 

 the crank "c." Forty-eight cell-cups 

 are thus dipped at one operation just 

 as quickly as a single cup is turned 

 out by twirling one stock in the man- 

 ner first described by Mr. Doolittle. 

 The cell-stick board "b" may be read- 

 ily removed from the apparatus. In 

 practice, three separate boards of 

 cell-sticks are provided. While one 

 set of cell-sticks is undergoing the 

 preparatory soaking and cooling in 



