372 THE BEEKEEPERS' REVIEW 



of black blood, are very irregularly marked, some showing much 

 of the yellow color, and some quite the reverse. 



In the spring of 1879 and for fourteen years previous to that 

 year, I had the common black bees only, nor were there any other 

 kind in my neighborhood which was in the township of North Shade, 

 Gratiot county, Michigan. In the spring of 1879 I purchased 

 an imported Italian queen of the Dadants (I think the price was 

 $10.00) and I am sure it was the best bee investment I ever made. 

 That queen must have been a pure Italian for all her drones were 

 duplicates of each other. One's first impression would be that they 

 were too dark in color to be Italians. I reared a good many queens 

 from that one and none of the drones of this imported queen, or 

 of her daughters ever showed any different markings. They 

 were not exactly the color of the common black kind, but a little 

 on the leather color cast, but no yellow bands or clouds of yellow 

 as seen on drones of impure stock. 



In the fall of 1882 all the bees in the "North Shade Apiary" 

 were pure Italians and many of the queens were from daughters of 

 the imported one. 



My experience while rearing queens for my own use, and for 

 the trade was that the queen's progeny from a pure queen mother, 

 was uniform under uniform conditions, but it must be remember- 

 ed that the conditions are seldom uniform early in the season, 

 and some queen cells would not be as well protected by the bees as 

 others and any chilling of the cells will cause delay in the queen's 

 hatching, or emerging from the cell, also such queens are always 

 darker than those that hatch on time, but I could never see that 

 this delay in hatching impaired the value of the queen except in 

 beauty and they are somewhat harder to find. 



If conditions were uniform and right all the queens from 

 one batch of cells would hatch on the thirteenth day from the time 

 the queen cell building was started, but for some reason the cells 

 are not all properly protected, in the nuclei after being removed to 

 their respective little hives. Early in the season some queens would 

 be one and two and even three days late in hatching, and the very 

 late ones were always very dark in color. 



All queen cells were built in very strong full colonies, eggs fur- 

 nished in strips of comb in right proportion for cells just three 

 days after they were laid by breeding queen, the larvae were stol- 

 on four days later, from all but the best looking cells, bees immed- 

 i3,tely moving royal jelly to the queen cells containing larvae. These 

 colls produced queens for business for three to four years to come. 



