Nov. 1. UtU 



661 



any thing like 

 25 i)er cent of 

 the eggs should 

 fail to mature, 

 as Mr. \Vesle>- 

 F' o s t e r s u g - 

 gests, the ap- 

 pearance of the 

 comb woukl be 

 very patchy in- 

 deed, unless 

 one assu nies 

 that the work- 

 ers immediate- 

 ly remove these 

 eggs and the 

 c|ueen rei)laces 

 them. I have 

 always thought 

 that p a t c h y 

 brood -combs 

 indicate a poor 

 queen. 



Last season, 

 page 5S-1, Sept. 

 15, 1910, I de- 

 scribed a meth- 

 od of swarm 

 prevention 

 which I have 

 success fu 1 1 y 

 tried this year. 

 Briefly put, it 

 consists in con- 

 fining the queen to an upper story for ten 

 days by means of an excluder. In one case 

 I accidentally shut the queen into a shal- 

 low super almost full of honey. When I 

 found her a week later she had a little patch 

 of brood and eggs in one or two combs. I 

 put her below the excluder, and this was one 

 of the very few strong colonies that made 

 no attempt to swarm. 



I had a great many supersedure swarms 

 this year. From my own experience, and 

 from conversations with other bee-keepers, 

 I am convinced that these swarms are very 

 much more common than is generally be- 

 lieved. Of course a supersedure colony is 

 often weak, and on that account not liable 

 to swarm. If it should be strong, and a fair 

 honey-flow on, I believe it will nearly al- 

 ways cast a swarm. If I am correct, this is 

 a strong reason against letting bees do their 

 own superseding. 



A PRIME SWARM CAST THREE DAYS BEFORE 

 CELLS WERE STARTED. 



This season I had an experience which to 

 me is unique. A colony cast a prime swarm 

 without so much as an egg in a queen-cell. 

 I had looked through the hive a few days 

 before, and carefully, as swarming prepara- 

 tions were rife. When the swarm issued I 

 concluded that I had been careless; and, 

 hiving the swarm with the clipped queen 

 on the old stand, I moved the parent hive 

 to a new location. A few days afterward 

 the bees of the swarm seemed uneasy, and, 

 on opening the hive, I knew at once from 

 the roar that they had somehow lost their 

 queen. I thought the best thing to do was 



W. i;n.sley and his portable exlracliiig-outflt having a capacity oi 4400 lbs. of 

 honey extracted and put in cans in 15 hours. 



to return the parent hive after cutting out 

 all the queen-cells but one. When I came 

 to look for them, there was not even the be- 

 ginning of a queen-cell to be found any- 

 where. I looked over every comb three 

 times to make sure. Having lost all its 

 field bees it was an easy colony to look over. 

 I then concluded that a virgin must have 

 hatched out, though I could not see a sign 

 of a destroyed cell. I placed this hive with 

 the brood on top of the swarm. The next 

 day I looked at them again, and found 

 queen-cells started everywhere. This case 

 seems to me remarkable in two ways: First, 

 the casting of the prime swarm without cells 

 started; second, that the parent colony with 

 lots of young bees had, in three days, made 

 no attempt to start them. 

 Hatzic, B. C, Can. 



A PORTABLE EXTRACTING-OUTFIT. 



4500 Lbs. of Honey in 15 Hours. 



BY R. W. ENSLEY. 



The illustration shows my portable ex- 

 tracting-outfit and my liquid-weighing ma- 

 chine for filling five-gallon cans with honey. 

 It will be noticed that the wagon has an ex- 

 tension box, the extension on one side ac- 

 commodating the gasoline-stove and that 

 on the other side the comb-carrier. There 

 is also an extension at the back end of the 

 wagon, which is used when passing the car- 

 riers in and out under the mosquito-netting 

 curtain. The wagon, as it is shown, is all 



