JULY 15, 1916 



593 



that I am right. I do believe that the basis 

 of estimate you will find is right, the you 

 may differ as to the amount of investment 



and cost of operation. If it is your plea- 

 sure to debate these items, stick to the "per- 

 colony" unit in your estimates. 

 Providence, R. I. 



EASY QUEEN -REARING 



BY ALLEN LATHAM 



Not a few beekeepers fail to renew the 

 queens in their colonies with sufficient fre- 

 quency because of the difficulty of getting 

 the queens. They do not feel like buying so 

 many queens, and they do not find it an 

 easy task to rear their own queens. 



The various methods in vogue will work 

 in t)he hands of their originators. When 

 some one else tries a well-advised scheme he 

 runs upon snags. In the end the queens he 

 raises cost as much as or more than queens 

 bought outright. I have probably tried 

 every plan of queen-rearing that has ever 

 come to my notice — some with fair success, 

 others with rank failure. Either I got too 

 small a percentage of queens or else the 

 queens were poor. 



After years of trial and effort I stumbled 

 upon a method which is giving me more 

 uniform success than any other. It is so 

 simple that it would seem as if any one 

 could succeed with it, and so economical 

 that even professional queen-rearers will 

 probably find it worthy a trial. The objec- 

 tion to be i^^i^n^l with the majority of meth- 

 ods of queen-rearing is that they give too 

 few queens for the bees employed. 



It is generally taught that a colony will 

 not rear over a score of good queens at a 

 time. This means the employment of a full 

 colony of bees for some ten days and only 

 a dozen or score of queens to pay for the 

 expense. If that same colony can be made 

 to turn out 50 to 100 good queens in the 

 same time, it is easy to see that the expense 

 is tremendously lessened. Many a year I 

 have neglected to rear as many queens as I 

 desired, simply because it meant the em- 

 ployment of so many colonies to do the 

 work. Now one colony will give me all the 

 queens I want in one batch. 



The photograph shows that the cells tho 

 numerous are good ones, and never by any 

 methods that I have employed have more 

 uniformly good queens been obtained. 



This method in Connecticut can be used 

 any time from April to September, but it 

 givies the very best success during the 

 swarming season. The steps to be followed 

 are these : 



1. Prepare cell cups to the number of 

 queens desired up to 100. Fasten these 

 closely togetlier on slats, crowding them so 



that 18 or 20 come within a length of 11 

 inches. This can be done by zigzagging 

 them on a strip one inch wide. Two or 

 even three such sti-ips can be fastened in 

 one frame. Two or even three frames can 

 be prepared. 



Allen 



Not peanuts but qiieen-oells — illustrating 

 Latham's easy method of rearing queens. 



2. Put small pieces of foundation at the 

 ends of the strips so that the wax bees will 

 have a chance to use up surplus wax, other- 

 wise many cells will be engulfed in comb. 

 Also put in a lower strip of wood with only 

 foundation on it. These strips should be 

 placed about 1% inches apart — enough, any 

 way, to allow the cells to clear the strip 

 below them when they are finished. 



3. Select some strong colony in the after- 

 noon — a colony vvliicii has a host of nurse 



