THOUSAND ANSWERS 
73 
A. Eggs are likely to be laid in drone-cells as soon as there 
is a considerable flow, and drones will appear 24 days later. 
Q. Will drones stay with a colony of bees without a queen? 
A. Yes, better than with a queen. 
is it? TW ° ° f h ' VeS haVC S ° me droncs yet (November.) Why 
A. Im afraid they’re queenless; yet it sometimes happens 
that drones are suffered late where there is a good queen and 
plenty of honey. 
Q. I find that one of my colonies is still rearing drones. The 
queen looks all right. She has been one of the best among 65. She 
is supposed to be young as she came through the mail in May, 
and I started her with a small bunch of bees, and she built up a 
strong colony. I didn’t notice any drones until lately. (January.) 
A. The queen may be all right and she may be all wrong. It 
sometimes happens that a colony takes a notion to cherish some 
drones after drones are generally killed off, keeping them through 
the winter, while the queen is all right, but the fear is that your 
queen has become a drone-layer, even if she is not old. You can 
probably tell by the sealed brood next spring or even now, if 
there is any sealed brood present. If you find cappings of worker- 
cells flat, that’s all right. If they are raised and rounded, like so 
many little marbles, the queen is a drone-layer, and should be 
killed. To be sure, there has been known such a thing as a queen 
getting over being a drone-layer, as W. M. Whitney has reported, 
but you better not count on that. 
Q. My bees had no drones to speak of this season, except on 
two or three days when I saw four or five flying from two hives, 
and the bees killed them right away. What was the cause? 
A. The absence of drones may be due to the poorness of the 
season. Keeping drones is a sort of luxury that bees indulge in 
when they are prosperous, and when forage is scarce they do 
not feel they can afford it. 
Q. My nearest beekeeping neighbor is a mile and one-quarter. 
If I stock up with Italians is there much danger of my queens be- 
ing fertilized by his black drones? I use full sheets of foundation, 
and have very few drones. He uses only starters, and I saw whole 
frames in his hives that were built out solid with drone-comb, ex- 
cept two inches where the starter was. He had six colonies, and 
got no surplus. They swarmed as soon as they got a half-gallon of 
bees in a hive, and I don’t want any of his stock, but would like 
to rear most of my own queens. Two of those I reared were 
larger and better layers than the one I bought. 
