26 SUCCESSFUL BEE-KEEPING. 
and leave for home, for home is where the queen and the 
broods are, and there, too, the honey will go. If the sep- 
- aration happen to take place while the queen is in the 
side apartment, the thing may seem to work; the parent 
stock prospering, but the new colony is pent up for breed- 
ing space for worker bees, and will never thrive-—By 
which I do not mean that it may not live, and struggle 
along for several years, and be called a swarm of bees; but 
that it will not throw off good strong swarms, nor yield 
any considerable amount of surplus honey. 
Indeed, all these hives have the same faults ; the 
greatest being the over-production of drone cone. thus 
contracting the breeding space for the queen till the sea- 
son for drone rearing comes, when a flood of these appear, 
consuming all the surplus of the workers, now daily 
diminishing in numbers. Thus it is that the apiary soon 
“runs out,” as the phrase is. But this is only the legiti- 
mate result of a system founded in error ; and it cannot 
be remedied even by the use of movable frames operated 
on the same erroneous principle, as many have sought to 
do. It is true, the scientzfic bee-keeper may, with considera- 
ble diligence and care, control drone breeding to a certain 
extent by the use of frames on the system above de- 
scribed ; yet he must be exceedingly careful that his 
queen-rearing swarms are not large and in possession of 
vacant space to be filled up with worthless combs. It’is 
conceded that bees consume from twenty to twenty-five 
pounds of honey to elaborate one of wax.* Besides this, 
a swarm destitute of a queen is in an unnatural condition, 
and, however large, labors mainly to supply the present 
necessity, which is to rear a queen and drones to fecund- 
* Whether it takes twenty-five pounds of honey to make one of wax, I am 
not prepared to prove ; probably it is near the truth.— Quinby. 
