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DR. MILLERS 
A. Yes. 
Q. If a queen is never allowed to mate with a drone, would 
she lay fertile eggs? 
A. If she lays eggs at all, they will produce only drones. 
Q. How many times does a queen mate? 
A. Once for life; but some cases have been reported in which 
a queen mated the second time. She may, however, make sev- 
eral flights before mating. 
Q. How long will it take after a queen is hatched for her to 
mate? 
A. Five days or longer. 
Q. Do you agree that a queen is never mated after she is two 
or three weeks old? Last March I had a colony of bees super- 
sede its queen, and this colony contained just a small patch of 
drone-brood which did not hatch till the queen was about 10 days 
old, and there was no other drone-brood in the yard. The queen 
commenced to lay when she was about two months old, and now 
she is the mother of one of the strongest colonies. I give this 
simply for what it is worth. I examined this colony once every 
two days, till the queen started to lay, and so these figures are 
accurate. 
A. As a general rule a queen is never mated after she is 10 
days old — perhaps not after she is a week old. But there are ex- 
ceptions, and how far those exceptions extend I don’t know. If 
your queen did not lay till two months old, she may have been 
fertilized only three days before she began to lay, and she may 
have been fertilized sooner, but likely she was at least a month 
old when fertilized. This is exceptional. 
Q. Do you think queens would mate with drones a mile away? 
There is a big woods between us. 
A. Yes, a distance greater than that would not prevent 
mating. 
Q. How far away from other bees would we have to place 
a colony to insure pure mating? 
A. You might be safe at two miles, but to be entirely safe 
you might have to be five miles or more. No one knows exactly 
how far. 
Q. Please say how queen-breeders mate queens purely while 
bees of other “nationalities” are present. 
A. They don’t; at least not always. For if it is desired to keep 
a certain kind pure, they do not have any other kind in the apiary. 
But something may be done toward getting what you want in 
this way: 
