A YEAR'S WORK IN AN OUT-APIARY 45 



A "ripe" cell is one from which the queen will emerge in from 

 twenty to thirty hours, and I have often carried such for from one to- 

 twelve hours, In the way here given, without the loss or Injury of a 

 single queen. In this work the wadding is far preferable to cotton 

 batting, for the glazing on the wadding keeps the cotton from sticking 

 to the cell or cell-protector, as it is otherwise liable to do. 



After killing the queen the frames are all put back in the hive, 

 when two of the center ones are pried apart enough so that the cell- 

 protector will go down just under the top-bar to the frame, when the 

 frames are brought back in place again, this imbedding the protector 

 into the comb so it is securely fastened there until removed by the 

 apiarist.* As this is the season of the year when the bees do most of 

 their superseding of queens (it seems so natural to them), my loss In 

 using this plan will not average more than one queen-cell out of twenty 

 given. So small a loss will not pay for a special visit to the apiary to 

 ascrtain whether colonies so treated obtain laying queens or not — 

 especially as the colony which will occasionally destroy a cell or kill 

 the just-emerged virgin queen have brood of their own from which to- 

 rear a queen, so the loss is never very great, should an occasional cell 

 be destroyed. Of course, there is a chance that the young queen may be 

 lost when going out to meet the drone, in which case that colony is 

 doomed unless rescued by the apiarist. In such a case as this the ob- 

 serving apiarist will easily discover this loss by an outside diagnosis 

 of such colonies at a later visit to the apiary. This requeening at this 

 time is so easily done that there is no excuse for having poor queens 

 at the out-apiary. 



The reader may think that what is here given conflicts with what 

 I have written in the past about allowing the bees to take care of the 

 superseding of their queens themselves. With the small and contracted 

 brood-chamber, I still hold that the bees will take care of that matter 

 fully as well as the apiarist can; but with this system of working, and 

 that with ten-frame Langstroth hives, a queen will lay nearly as many 

 eggs in two years as she would under the contraction system in three 

 or four years; so that any queen which is more than two years old is 

 almost sure to be played out; therefore I make it a practice with this 

 plan to supersede all queens which are two years old at this time, and 

 in the way given above. This plan is one of strenuousness all the 

 way through, by which we get a multitude of bees in the field at all 

 times during the honey harvests; and even when ordinary colonies are 

 doing nothing, or securing only a living, these rousing colonies are 

 actually laying up stores. Last May, when the colonies as ordinarily 

 worked were living only from hand to mouth, these big colonies at the 

 out-apiary actually laid up from twenty to thirty pounds of stores in the 

 combs above their brood. And then when other colonies were working 

 a very little or not at all in the section supers, these were completing 

 their first forty-four sections, and well at work in the second super of 



* See out on page 4 



