THOUSAND ANSWERS 75 



A. Any time. Prevention, however, is better than cure. Allow 

 very little drone-comb in your hives and you'll have few drones. 



For greater safety to the queen. If there was only one drone 

 for each queen, the queen might make many trips before mating. 



Drumming. — Q. What do you mean, in answering queries, by 

 "drumming" the bees out of a hive in transferring, and how is it 

 done? Is it knocking on the sides or top, and for how long, and 

 how hard? Do you use just the fingers, or fist, or stick? 



A. Turn a hive upside down, drum on the sides of the hive 

 with your fists or a heavy stick on the opposite sides, and if you 

 drum long enough with heavy strokes you will set the bees to 

 running up into whatever is placed over. No light tapping with 

 your fingers will do, neither with the fists, unless strong and 

 heavy. 



Dummies. — Q. What are dummies? What is their construc- 

 tion and use ? 



A. Take a top-bar and nail a board on so that the length of 

 the board is the same as the length of a frame, and the depth of 

 top-bar and all the same as the depth of frame, top-bar and all. 

 That's your dummy. It may be an inch thick, or anything less 

 down to one-quarter inch. It is used to fill up any space desired, 

 and especially at one side of a hive. If no dummy is in the hive 

 it is hard to get out the first frame, if the frames are self-spacing 

 or fixed-distance frames. If there is a space filled with a dummy 

 at one side, it is easy to take out the dummy, and then easy to 

 take out any desired frame. 



(See also Division-Boards.) 



Q. You are often called upon to explain what dummies are, 

 how they are made, and how used in the hives. In confining a 

 small colony to one side of the hive, do you fill the empty space 

 with anything? 



A. A weak colony, say one that needs only four frames, may 

 have a dummy at one side of the frames with the remaining space 

 in the hive left entirely vacant; only the dummy must be moved 

 and a frame or frames added as needed. Generally, however, 

 when one has a weak colony of that kind which is expected to 

 build up, one has enough empty combs to fill up the hive, and in 

 that case I wouldn't use a duirimy at all. You may ask whether 

 the bees would not be warmer to have the combs that are occupied 

 shut ofif from the empty combs by a dummy. One would naturally 

 think so, yet experiments carefully made, if I remember rightly, 



