THOUSAND ANSWERS 73 



A. Eggs are likely to be laid in drone-cells as soon as there 

 is a considerable flow, and drones will appear 24 days later. 

 Q. Will drones stay with a colony of bees without a queen? 

 A. Yes, better than with a queen. 



Q. Two of my hives have some drones yet (November.) Why 

 is it? 



A. I'm afraid they're queenless ; yet it sometimes happens 

 that drones are suffered late where there is a good queen and 

 plenty of honey. 



Q. I find that one of my colonies is still rearing drones. The 

 queen looks all right. She has been one of the best among 65. She 

 is supposed to be young as she came through the mail in May, 

 and I started her with a small bunch of bees, and she built up a 

 strong colony. I didn't notice any drones until lately. (January.) 



A. The queen may be all right and she may be all wrong. It 

 sometimes happens that a colony takes a notion to cherish some 

 drones after drones are generally killed off, keeping them through 

 the winter, while the queen is all right, but the fear is that your 

 queen has become a drone-layer, even if she is not old. You can 

 probably tell by the sealed brood next spring or even now, if 

 there is any sealed brood present. If you find cappings of worker- 

 cells flat, that's all right. If they are raised and rounded, like so 

 many little marbles, the queen is a drone-layer, and should be 

 killed. To be sure, there has been known such a thing as a queen 

 getting over being a drone-layer, as W. M. Whitney has reported, 

 but you better not count on that. 



Q. My bees had no drones to speak of this season, except on 

 two or three days, when I saw four or five flying from two hives, 

 and the bees killed them right away. What was the cause? 



A. The absence of drones may be due to the poorness of the 

 season. Keeping drones is a sort of luxury that bees indulge in 

 when they are prosperous, and when forage is scarce they do 

 not feel they can afford it. 



Q. My nearest beekeeping neighbor is a mile and one-quarter. 

 If I stock up with Italians is there much danger of my queens be- 

 ing fertilized by his black drones? I use full sheets of foundation, 

 and have very few drones. He uses only starters, and I saw whole 

 frames in his hives that were built out solid with drone-comb, ex- 

 cept two inches where the starter was. He had six colonies, and 

 got no surplus. They swarmed as soon as they got a half-gallon of 

 bees in a hive, and I don't want any of his stock, but would like 

 to rear most of my own queens. Two of those I reared were 

 larger and better layers than the one I bought. 



