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SEVENTH ANNUAL, REPORT OF THE 



pends more upon application than 

 length of time, the professor made 

 good, and while I am but a workman 

 from the quarries of bee-keeping ex- 

 periment, I should like that my work 

 for the temple of enthomological 

 knowledge should be like my hive, 

 blump, level and square. But I have 

 been in business just a little longer 

 than that. Forty years ago this sum- 

 mer in the month of August I made my 

 first original experiments in the bee 

 business. My father then had, as he 

 claimed, the largest apiary in Penn- 

 sylvania. His bees sometimes sulked 

 — "balked," as he called it, and hung 

 in great clusters under the hives. He 

 frequently expressed the wish that he 

 knew some way to break up their in- 

 disposition. So I studied it out for him, 

 as all beginners in the bee business 

 should do; the old fellows have been 

 so long wearing their grooves that they 

 cannot get out of the ruts. I studied 

 it out for him and proceeded to the 

 experiment. With a long pole I 

 climbed into a tree over one of the 

 colonies that had clustered outside in 

 a great bunch. With one straight jab 

 I broke up the cluster and at the same 

 time very effectually broke up their 

 indisposition. W^hat happened to me, 

 I will never tell you. But when the 

 doctor stopped coming a few days lat- 

 er, he advised me not to make any 

 more experiments along that line; that, 

 in fact, the bees were not indisposed; 

 that although they were not secreting 

 honey nectar they were secreting en- 

 ergy, and if they were not depositing 

 honey in their wax cells which they 

 had prepared, they were not at all re- 

 luctant to deposit energy in cells of 

 flesh already prepared. Now the con- 

 clusion of the story is this: If any of 

 you discover a method of breaking 

 up sulking by which the bees will 

 store honey in wax cells as rapidly as 

 those bees stored energy in flesh cells, 

 prepaife a paper on the subject for the 

 next national convention. 



But from the day of that experi- 

 ment to this I have been practically 

 immune to bee stings, and that first 

 experiment prepared me for all later 

 investigation. 



My first experiment in queen rear- 

 ing that departed from all my fath- 

 er's methods, consisted in sawing off 

 the heads of clothespins about an inch 

 long, cutting queen cups from brood 

 combs and fastening them on the ends 

 of the clothespins, then with the pin 



picking out a little wax with adhering 

 egg from a worker cell and sticking 

 that in the center of the queen cup, 

 then boring a hole through the top of 

 the hive and pushing the clothespin 

 with its queen cup and egg into this 

 hole; having previously made the 

 queenless colony by removing a hive 

 and placing in its stead a hive with a 

 little sealed brood to catch the flying 

 bees from the removed colony. All 

 that I know of modern methods of 

 queen rearing is but a refinement of 

 the principles thus experimented with. 

 Now instead of the clothespins we use 

 the Pratt wooden cell cups. And in- 

 stead of taking the queen cups from 

 the hive we have the Pratt cell form- 

 ing machine. And yet generally I use 

 the Doolittle method, making the 

 queen cups in large quantities and 

 fastening them to the wooden cups 

 with a glass hot-wax dropper, the 

 same dropper I use to fasten full 

 sheets of foundation in sections, fas- 

 tening them on four sides. Instead of 

 using a pin to transfer the egg from 

 the worker cell to the queen cup, I 

 use a little punch that cuts out a 

 small disc from the base of the worker 

 cell with an egg in the center; inside 

 of this punch is a sliding cylinder 

 which pushes the disc from the punch 

 and at the same time nicely fastens 

 it in the queen cup. In warm weather 

 the grafting of larvae is just as con- 

 venient, except that the queen cups 

 must be moistened with royal jelly, 

 diluted honey, or saliva commonly 

 called spit. I have also tested having 

 queens lay directly in the cells, but 

 I prefer the transfer onethod. The 

 "Swarm-box" method of having cups 

 built into cells is not used when eggs 

 are transferred, nor is it at all neces- 

 sary when larvae are grafted. With 

 a strong colony of bees there is never 

 any trouble to get cells started, even 

 in April, if we place a porter bee-es- 

 cape honey board with the escape re- 

 moved between two stories of the col- 

 ony with brood above, being careful 

 to have the queen in the lower story, 

 and a piece of queen excluding zinc 

 over the opening in the honey board, 

 and a "division board feeder" filled 

 with water, or very thin sugar syrup, 

 in the upper story. 



Instead of placing the wooden cell 

 cups in holes bored through the top 

 of the hive, they are placed in holes 

 bored in the top of brood frames, or. 



