THE REARING OF QUEEN BEES. 2 ( .) 
Tested queens which have been kept in full colonies to observe 
purity of mating, and which after pne season show that they pos« 
ability to produce strong colonies, are sold as "select tested.' 5 How- 
ever, ir is to be feared that some queen breeders are not careful enough 
about this test and that queens are often sold under this guaranty which 
are simply tested queens one year old, which simply means that their 
life of usefulness is thereby shorter by one year. For breeding, nothing 
but the very best of "select tested" queens should be used. Great care 
should be exercised in choosing such queens by watching purity of 
mating, proliticness. honey production of workers, disposition of tx 
tendency to keep a very large colony of bees at all seasons : and especially, 
care should be taken that brood rearing does not cea<e as soon as the 
honey flow slackens in midsummer. Some bees, otherwise good, will 
stop brood rearing with the first sign of a decrease in honey, with the 
result that the colony enters the fall flow with old bees, and that 
scarcely anything but old bees are in the colony at the beginning of 
winter. This is probably the essential cause of the excessive death of 
bees in early spring, known as "spring dwindling." 
NECESSITY OF PURE STOCK. 
The necessity of purely -mated queens for breeding can not be too 
emphatically urged. The so-called " hybrids," or mismated queens, 
produce young queens of so much variability in every character that 
it is very unwise to use them. There is one phase of queen breeding 
which would doubtless prove useful, but which ha^ not yet been tried 
to any extent. The first crosses of various races have proven very 
useful; as, for example, the cross between Cyprians and Carniolans, 
but no breeder to the writer's knowledge has ever undertaken to fix 
the type. That this could be done seems very probable, reasoning 
from what we know of crosses in other animal-, and by careful selec- 
tion of prolific queens whose workers showed all the characteristics 
of the first cross, these crosses would doubtless prove valuable as 
breeders. Under no other circumstances, however, should mismated 
queens be used. 
SELECTION OF DRONES. 
The selection of drones is one of the things in which the vast 
majority of bee keepers are notoriously careless. Queen breeder- 
will select a breeding queen with great care and allow her progeny to 
mate with drones from any hive in the apiary, and just as long as this 
is done there can be no advance in the types. Drones should not be 
allowed to fly except from colonies where the queens are prolific and 
the bees good workers, and just as much car* 4 should be exercised in 
the choice of colonic- for the production of drones as for breeding 
