^ueen Lamp Nursery Described. 



241 



With these in front of hive, we can keep the queen from 

 leaving with a swarm. Occasionally, however, a queen 

 will crowd through. By keeping empty frames and empty 

 cells in the nuclei, the bees may be kept active; yet with 

 so few bees, one cannot expect very much from the nuclei. 

 After cutting all the queen-cells from our old hive, we can 

 again insert eggs, as above suggested, and obtain another 

 lot of cells, or, if we have a sufficient number, we can 

 leave a single queen-cell, and this colony will soon be the 

 happy possessor of a queen, and just as flourishing as if 

 the even tenor of its ways had not been disturbed. If it 



Fig. 94. 



Drone Trap, 



is preferred, the bees of this colony may be used in form- 

 ing the nuclei, in which case there is no danger of getting 

 a queen in any nucleus thus formed or of having the 

 queen-cells destroyed. We can thus start seven or eight 

 nuclei very quickly. Mr. Doolittle forms nuclei by dis- 

 turbing the bees — jarring the hive — till they fill with 

 honev, then shakes them into a hive or box and sets them 

 in a dark room or cellar for twenty-four hours. Then 

 they will always, he says, accept a queen-cell or a virgin 

 queen of any age at once. A full colony may be safely 

 re-queened in the same way. 



QUEEN LAMP NURSERY. 



This is substantially a tin hive, with two walls enclosing 

 a water-tight space an inch wide, which, when in use, is 



16 



