RE-QUEENING. 12.1 



By grafting a queen cell on the comb of a queenless colony. 

 You must first make it queenless, and let it remain so for three 

 or four days. Illustrations of this have been given elsewhere. 

 Like the former method, there is no saving of time in this. Its 

 only advantage over the other method is that you introduce a 

 queen from a better strain of bees. 



By the aid of chloroform : I have never tried this, but in 

 the Canadian Bee Journal, page 390, are these words: — "Drop 

 a dry sponge into the fire-barrel of the smoker, then a sponge 

 wetted with chloroform (a teaspoonful), and another dry one on 

 the top of this in the nozzle, when you are ready for action. 

 Proceed to the queenless colonies, and puff in the chloroform at 

 the entrance (as in the act of smoking), say for a quarter of a 

 minute. Then pass to the next (hive), and so on, for about two 

 minutes. Return to the first hive, give a few more puffs with 

 your chloroform-smoker, and let your queen run in." The writer 

 claims that in this manner you may run in fifty queens in so 

 many minutes, and in each case be successful. 



By leaving the colony queenless for a given period. It is well 

 known that if a colony is deprived of its queen that the tone 

 -emitted by the bees differs from that previously uttered, and that 

 when their own queen is reintroduced peace seems to reign, and 

 the bees appear to be happy. Huber, in the early days of scien- 

 tific bee-keeping, demonstrated this; but when he attempted tc 

 substitute a strange queen in lieu of their own, they declared war 

 to the knife with her. Now, what was the reason ? Most of the 

 lower order of animals recognise each other by the senses of touch 

 and smell. Ants meeting each other touch with their antennae, 

 their organs of smell, and there is no doubt that bees recognise 

 their queen in the same way. On one occasion I rolled a queen 

 in honey, and introduced her to a colony at the same time as I 

 withdrew the reigning queen. It was a success. At other times 

 I have tried the same plan, and it has been a failure. 



