98 ALEXANDER'S WRITINGS ON PRACTICAL BEE CULTURE 



themselves with it. Leave them this way until you are sure that every bee 

 in the box is as full of honey as it can be, then ^ve them a. little shake and 

 remove the cover from the hole in the end of the box (remember it Is about 

 five hours since they were confined in the box), and let run in any number 

 of queens you wish, including their own mother. Now return them to their 

 dish of honey so they can help themselves to all they can eat until about 

 sundown: then take this introducing-box with its bees and queens to the 

 hive from which you took the bees and their queen in the morning; set 

 them to one side and feed the colony all you can induce it to eat. Remove 

 some of its combs and pour in some of the honey you have been feeding to 

 the bees in the box. Shake some of this honey out of its combs on these 

 bees, so every one will soon be full. Now remove the cover of the introducing- 

 box and set the box in the hive alongside the combs. Close up the top of 

 the hive, and in the morning all the bees and queens will be clustered on 

 the combs, and some of the queens will have commenced to lay. You can 

 now give them the brood you took away from them the day before, or let 

 them fill their combs with eggs, which five queens will do in three or four 

 days. That is all there is of it. 



Now why is this method a. success? First, because the bees have been 

 a few hours without their queen and brood; next, a small part of their colony 

 was confined in a, box and filled with honey for several hours before the 

 strange queens were given them; then those bees and these queens were shut 

 up long enough together to become all of the same odor before they were 

 given to the colony. 



There are some things in this method that must not be overlooked. 

 You first confine enough bees in the introducing-box to give to the queens 

 you introduce the same scent as the colony is, to which you intend to put 

 them; then the whole colony has been queenless and broodless for a few 

 hours, and you have fed them in the box all they could hold before giving 

 them these queens, and you have also fed the colony all they could eat before 

 they received the queens and their bees. I find bees, like men, are better- 

 natured when their stomachs are full. 



