Junk 1907.] 



Live Stock. 



I may here add that, although European foundation is larger than their 

 own cells, Mee-messa will settle down on it and build excellent combs from it. If 

 possible, the hive should be placed under the shade of trees, where you will find 

 they work well and contentedly. 



Increasing Stock. 



Suppose your bees have well filled the hive (eight frames), they will naturally 

 throw off a swarm, so as to make room for the hatching brood. In this case, they 

 will rear about 600 to 1,000 drones and build half-a-dozen queen-cells (or perhaps 

 more). The old queen will then fly out to found a new colony with about 40,000 bees. 

 If you permit this, you will lose the swarm, unless you can follow it and hive it. 

 You should, however, take out two of the centre frames (trying to get one with the 

 queen on it) and place them in a new hive, putting the two outside frames (which 

 almost always contain only honey) on either side of them, and closing up the dummy- 

 boards in the new hive as well as the old. The stock that is left without a queen 

 will now proceed to raiae a queen-cell over some of the worker-cells containing 

 unsealed brood- If you have Mee-messa, you can perform this operation any time 

 during the swarming season of the Avild bees, as you can be quite certain there will 

 be plenty of wild drones about. But if your bees are Europeans, you must be care- 

 ful only to do it while there are drones in your apiary— otherwise the young queen 

 will not be mated. 



In some twenty days your young queen will be beginning to lay ; and in a 

 few weeks you will have a second hive as strong as the original. This is the simple 

 method of working for increase. But if you go in for apiculture on the most 

 advanced and scientific lines, you will learn from books that there are better ways 

 of doing it. The great bee-men of England and America have methods by which 

 they can secure hundreds of surplus queens. As only one queen exists in one hive, 

 this may sound like waste of time. But when I tell you that European queens cost 

 from Rs : 3 to Rs. : 30, you will perceive that there are possibilities of money-making 

 in scientific queen-breeding. The highest price ever paid for a queen was 500 dollars 

 (Rs : 1,500) ; and each of her daughter-queens were sold for Rs : 600. If you can raise 

 a queen whose progeny can always gather honey from red clover, you can sell her in 

 America for Rs : 10,000 and will be thought a fool for letting her go so cheap ! And 

 while I am on the subject of prices and profits, it may be interesting to note that the 

 largest yield of honey achieved in one year by a single hive of bees was over 1,000 lbs, 

 Seeing that run-honey (that is, extracted) is worth about 25 cts ; per lb., wholesale, 

 you may realize that their owner made a nice little income out of this stock. A 

 beginner, however, should not count on more than 100 to 150 lbs. from each hive. 



The Honey Flow, 



During the monsoon, the native bee winters, the queen doing little or no 

 egg-laying. Therefore, at the close of the bad weather, the stock will not contain 

 so many bees. Now, if a stock is weak, it will not gather much honey. Your object 

 must, therefore, be to get your stocks very strong just at the moment when the 

 honey-flow sets in. In order to achieve this, you must study the flowers of your 

 particular district, so as to determine the exact months when the greatest amount of 

 honey may be expected. In Colombo, as far as I have been able to judge, this occurs 

 from Christmas to May— March and April being the best. In Nuwara Eliya there 

 appear to be two honey-flows, one in October, when the gorse is all in blossom, and 

 the second from March to May, when the acacias (and many other flowers) are out. 

 And when these important moments arrive, your hives should all be roaring with 

 bees. If you have two weak stocks, you can unite them into one. A hive of 60,000 

 bees will gather far more honey than two hives each containing 30.000. This oper- 

 ation I will describe later. Meanwhile, if you care to take a little trouble with your 



