24 PRACTICAL QUEEN REARING 



The fact that there is great difficulty in controlling the male 

 parentage, makes the problem of breeding bees a more serious 

 one than breeders of animals have to face. On the other hand, 

 the possibility of several succeeding generations in a single 

 season makes it possible to secure results in a much shorter 

 period of time. 



The beekeeper, who is intent on bettering his stock, finds 

 it much simpler to replace his poor stock with a better grade 

 than does the farmer who has a herd of scrub cattle or sheep. 

 Simply replacing the queens in his colonies shortly has the effect 

 of changing the entire stock in the apiary, since the workers 

 are short lived. If he is not inclined to buy enough queens to 

 replace the poorer ones in all his hives, he can very shortly rear 

 enough on his own account to do so, if he will give the matter 

 a little attention. If he buys even one good queen, he can 

 shortly improve the entire stock of an apiary of one hundred 

 or more colonies. To do this he should rear as many young 

 queens as there are colonies in his apiary, and use them to 

 replace the old and inferior queens. If he does this early in 

 the season, he need give little thought to the mating of his 

 young queens. If the mother from which he rears his stock 

 is pure, all the young queens will be pure. To be sure, most 

 of them will be mated with inferior drones, but it is a well 

 known fact that it is only the female offspring that are affected 

 by the mating of a queen. If her mother is purely mated, all 

 her drones will be pure, regardless of her own mating. Within 

 a few weeks there will be thousands of pure drones, the off- 

 spring of the young queens that have been introduced. The 

 beekeeper should then rear a second lot of queens from a pure 

 mother to replace all the mismated ones which were introduced 

 early in the season. By this time, most of the drones present 

 will be pure, and the second lot of queens will mostly be purely 

 mated. It is thus a simple matter to replace the entire stock 

 of a neighborhood with pure bees from the offspring of a single 

 pure queen. 



