68 ALEXANDER’S WRITINGS ON PRACTICAL BEE CULTURE 
all drones from as choice queens as you rear your queens from. In 
other words, drones must be developed the same as the queens. This 
may seem like an unnecesssary amount of trouble; but there is little 
of value in this world that does not cost labor to acquire. 
There are many bee-keepers who might make great improvements 
in their bees if they would only start in the right way. They seem to 
think that, if they buy a breeding-queen once in a year or two, it is 
about all that is necessary; and if her colony swarms they willl try 
to save some of the queen-cells, and then think they are improving 
their bees. Such a line of management is no improvement; and if that 
is the best that can be done, then it would be better to buy all the 
queens from some one who is doing better. The whole subject turns 
on this point: The best queens, bought or home-reared, are none too 
good, and the aim should be to make them still better with each suc- 
ceeding generation. 
February, 1908. 
NUCLEI FOR REARING QUEENS. 
Our nuclei have three combs each, size 5x9 inches, and about a pint 
of bees; they filled their combs so full that it was necessary to extract 
them frequently in order to give the young queens a chance to lay 
after they have become fertilized, and this was done some time before 
our August harvest. 
Now, when little nuclei of less than one pint of bees can fill up 
their combs with honey in this way when there is no special harvest on, 
and that in an apiary of 750 strong colonies, it does seem to me that 
this fear of overstocking was only imaginary. A few years ago when 
we thought our bees went only a mile or so from home to gather 
nectar, we had some excuse for believing it was easy to overstock a 
location; but as it is now, when we have an abundance of good proof 
that our bees will work to a good advantage on flowers five or six 
miles from home, and sometimes still further, it changes the whole 
subject. Just think of the millions of honey-producing flowers, when 
the weather is favorable, within a circle of ten or twelve miles in 
diameter. This is the turning-point of the whole subject—‘“When the 
weather is faovrable.” And when the weather is unfavorable for the 
secretion of nectar, it makes no difference how much bloom there is 
or how few colonies there are in the apiary. 
In regard to these nuclei I spoke of above, we find them very 
useful. My son fixed up fifteen about the 1st of July, and by Sept. 10 
we had taken out 63 choice laying queens from them to use in large 
colonies, besides some extracted honey, and the actual cost of these 
queens was not ten cents apiece. 
We have tried many different sizes of combs for nuclei; but, all 
things considered, we prefer small combs, of which three will fill one 
of our standard frames; then when we put them in our nucleus-boxes 
