ALEXANDER’S WRITINGS ON PRACTICAL BEE CULTURE 15 
REARING QUEENS FOR EARLY INCREASE. 
HOW TO UTILIZE UPPER STORIES AND PERFORATED ZINC FOR GETTING SEVERAL 
QUEENS FERTILIZED FROM ONE COLONY; A SCHEME FOR GETTING 
A LARGE AMOUNT OF BROOD. 
First, by way of explanation, I will say that in order to do this, we 
stimulate our bees by early feeding to early breeding, so we have many 
strong colonies quite early in the season; and in recommending this 
I am well aware that some very good bee-keepers prefer to have their 
colonies only of medium strength until about the commencement of their 
harvest for surplus. But as we handle our bees quite differently in 
many ways from some, we try hard to have all the strong full colonies 
we can as early as possible, and we seldom keep a queen after she is 
two years old. We supersede them some time during their third sum- 
mer. This necessitates killing about one-third every year. 
Now, after taking them from their winter quarters we walk along 
in front of our hives and count how many we have that are two years 
old. This is very easily done, for the little tin tag on the front of each 
hive tells us at a glance the age of the queen in the hive. These col- 
onies we now give especial attention to, we feed them regularly, and 
rather more at a time than we do the colonies that have younger queens. 
We also frequently give them frames of hatching brood from other col- 
onies, and at all times try to keep them as warm as we can. In this 
way we have no trouble in building them up strong and full of brood 
early in May; and while we are doing this we insert frames of comb 
that have some drone comb in near the middle of the two or three 
hives we wish to rear drones from to mate with our early queens. 
This should be done about ten days before we start the rearing of 
queen-cells. Then about May 15 we borrow the bees from several of 
our strongest colonies for one day to start our queen-cells, as is now 
practiced by Mr. Pratt, of Swarthmore, Pa., which I consider the finest 
way to start the rearing of choice queens of any thing I have ever 
tried, as we have to use these bees only one day, then we can give 
them their queen and brood, which leaves them in about as good con- 
dition as they were in before they were disturbed. When we counted 
up our old queens we found we had about 200 to be superseded. Now, 
this will require 400 young queens if we divide each one; then we 
have about 100 colonies that have younger queens that we wish to divide. 
They will require 100 more, so we find that we shall need some 500 
young queens to make our increase and supersede our old queens. 
Then we should allow about 50 for those that are lost, so we will start 
the rearing of about 600 cells. We would much rather have more cells and 
queens than we can use than to be short only a few. As soon as this 
is done we go to half the colonies that have two-year-old queens and 
kill their queens, also destroy any eggs or larve they may have in 
any queen-cells. Then we go to the boxés that have our newly started 
cells in, and take out five or six cells for each colony that has been 
