ITALIANIZING A WHOLE APIARY. 
79 
colonies will mix to some extent; but the young bees should be 
examined when just hatching from the combs, to see if all have 
the three yellow bands. If any queens are found to have mated 
with black drones, it is safest to remove them as soon as other 
queens can be reared to take their places, for although they will 
produce pure Italian drones, yet should such a stock swarm or 
vise its queen, a queen would be reared (unless prevented) from 
her hybridized eggs whosQ drone progeny would be impure. 
A nother method preferred by some, is to Italianize all your 
own and your neighbors’ stocks as far as practicable the first 
year. To do this, secure the construction ol as many queen- 
cells as possible from the brood in the Italian stock, and insert 
one in each nucleus. Let the queens hatch and become fertile, 
paying no attention to what kind of drones they meet. When 
fertile introduce them to the parent stocks, and rear others the 
same way before swarming. These queens, having been fertil- 
ized by black drones, their worker progeny will be hybrids, but 
their drones will be pure. The next season, all the drones in 
the apiary being pure Italians, the work is half accomplished. 
Then rear another set of queens, one for each hive, from the 
original pure one, and there being none other but pure drones in 
the neighborhood, the young queens will seldom find black ones, 
especially if the apiary be large. 
ITALIAN QUEEN REARING. 
The superiority of Italian bees is becoming so generally 
known that there is a great and constantly increasing demand 
for queens; hence the necessity for plain practical directions that 
