118 ITALIANIZING A WHOLE APJARY. 



colonies will mix to some extent; but the young bees should be 

 examined when just hatching from the combs, to see if all have 

 the three yellow bands. If any queens are found to have mated 

 with black drones, it is safest to remove them as soon as other 

 queens can be reared to take their places, for although they will 

 produce pure Italian drones, yet should such a stock swarm or 

 <ose its queen, a queen would be reared (unless prevented) from 

 her hybridized eggs whose drone progeny would be impure. 



Another method preferred by some, is to Italianize all your 

 own and your neighbors' stocks as far as practicable the first 

 year. To do this, secure the construction of as many queen- 

 cells as possible from the brood in the Italian stock, and insert 

 one in each nucleus. Let the queens hatch and become fertile, 

 paying no attention to what kind of drones they meet. When 

 fertile introduce them to the parent stocks, and rear others the 

 same way before swarming. These queens, having been fertil- 

 ized by black drones, their worker progeny will be hybrids, but 

 their drones will be pure. The next season, all the drones in 

 the apiary being pure Italians, the work is half accomplished. 

 Then rear another set of queens, one for each hive, from the 

 original pure one, and there being none other but pure drones in 

 the neighborhood, the young queens will seldom find black ones, 

 especially if the apiary be large. 



ITALIAN QUEEN REARING. 



The superiority of Italian bees is becoming so generally 

 known that there is a great and constantly increasing demand 

 for queens ; hence the necessity for plain practical directions that 



