216 



THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW, 



That there are some weighty objections to 

 swarming if it could be safely repressed is 

 not to be denied, but these may be reduced 

 to two, namely, the time and labor required 

 for watching and hiving swarms and the 

 danger of loss from swarms absconding. 

 Some may hold that undesirable increase is 

 another and a more serious one still, but 

 one should be easily able to obviate that 

 and indeed thereby reap a decided advan- 

 tage. It is only a question of the disposal of 

 the brood in the hive from which the swarms 

 issues and that is generally, especially in 

 early swarming, very valuable. To accom- 

 plish this it is not necessary, as might be 

 inferred from some discussions of the sub- 

 ject, that the brood when hatehedjor before 

 should be returned to the identical colony 

 that produced it, indeed, it may usually [be 

 used with decidedly greater advantage in 

 other ways. There are always at the open- 

 ing of the honey season some colonies that 

 are not up to the strength required for the 

 best work in the supers. Let the hives full 

 of rapidly hatching brood be distributed 

 among such deficient colonies as fast as 

 they can be obtained, first driving out of 

 each all the bees left behind, into the hive 

 which with its swarm is or is to be put on the 

 stand. Thus in a few days, if swarming 

 continues, all may be got into excellent con- 

 dition. Frequently, also, there are colon- 

 ies out of condition on account of being 

 possessed of superanuated or otherwise 

 worthless queens. Destroy such queens as 

 fast as hives of brood can be obtained and 

 place one on each now queenless colony and 

 in a few days it will be rejuvenated both in 

 its strength and its queen. In some 

 of these operations the advautages of 

 a horizontally divisible brood chamber 

 are especially apparent, for if one wishes to 

 help two colonies with the brood of one it 

 can be done without extrs. labor, or if one 

 wishes to rear a few surplus queens to meet 

 emergencies, without driving out the bees re- 

 maining after the swarm issues, by simply 

 dividing the brood chamber he may secure 

 two queens as easily and as cheaply as one. 

 Other ways of disposing of the brood thus 

 obtained through swarming will occur to 

 every one in practice, so that soon instead of 

 deploring its abundance one will be likely 

 to wish for more. 



There is one principle that is valuable in 

 this connection which i should recall before 

 passing, and that is that a colony having 



a laying queen of the current year's rearing 

 can be pretty surely relied upon not to de- 

 sire to swarm, no matter how strong it may 

 be made within any reasonable bounds, and 

 the same rule holds if it has a virgin queen 

 if there be not also occupied queen cells in 

 the hive. This fact may be taken advantage 

 of to safely make some of the strongest possi- 

 ble colonies and at the same time the most 

 profitable ones, notwithstanding the notion 

 which some cherish, but without good rea- 

 son I believe, that the possession of a virgin 

 queen renders a colony unprofitable for 

 comb honey. 



How best to minimize the disadvantages 

 of swarming which give rise to the other 

 objections I have mentioned is a somewhat 

 more ditticult matter. The absconding of 

 prime swarms can be almost certainly pre- 

 vented by having had the wings of the 

 queens previously clipped, which is most 

 conveniently done about the first of May 

 preceeding, but, though I have hitherto been 

 strongly in favor of it, and would take it as 

 a choice of evils in the absence of the queen 

 trap, I find it liable in an apiary of any con- 

 siderable extent where there is little danger 

 of swarms clustering out of convenient 

 reach, to one valid objection, and that is 

 that swarms usually remain a tantalizingly 

 long time in the air giving an unnecessarily 

 pressing invitation to other swarms and 

 perhaps virgin queens to join them, thus 

 complicating the matter of successful hiving. 

 In small apiaries this objection would not 

 have the same validity, but in any case 

 there is first the danger of the loss of val- 

 uable queens and then in nine or ten days, 

 in the absence of the apiarist, the loss of 

 powerful swarms with virgin queens, so I 

 now consider the queen trap indispensable 

 unless one is willing to watch his bees con- 

 tinually during the swarming season, and 

 even then it is a great convenience. For 

 this purpose the trap should be so made 

 that the queen once in it canuot return to 

 the hive. This enables the apiarist to de- 

 termine, with the exercise of a very little 

 attention, whether a swarm has issued dur- 

 ing his absence from any given hive or not 

 by the conduct of the bees and the greater 

 or less cluster remaining with the queen in 

 the trap. If a swarm has issued and return- 

 ed, usually the trap is found full of bees or 

 nearly so : in such case I return the queen 

 and bees to the hive and readjust the trap 

 with the expectation that in a day or two I 



