84 
ITALIAN BEES. 
stock from which you may wish to breed. The queen-cells must 
be removed by the tenth day from the time the brood was 
inserted, lest a queen should hatch and destroy all the other cells 
in the hive. If the comb containing eggs and larvae for queen, 
cells be new, more cells will be built. Before inserting it in the 
queenless stock it should be cut in strips an inch wide by three 
inches long. To insert one of these strips, make an opening in 
the comb three inches long by one inch deep, and directly under 
this cut out a piece two-and-a-half inches long by one inch deep, 
which will give room for lengthening down the cells, and also 
leave a shoulder to support each end of the strip. As fast as 
the cells are used other strips may be inserted in the same open- 
ings. A queen is seldom injured while caged if the wire-clotl) 
be neither coarser nor finer than fifteen or twenty meshes to the 
inch. The cage is sometimes made by winding a piece of wire- 
cloth around the thumb and stopping the ends with corks, but 
we prefer them made about three-eighths of an inch deep, nail- 
ing the edges of the wire-cloth to a wooden bottom. When 
introducing a queen, the cage is sometimes suspended in the hive 
by a wire between two combs, but the safety of the queen is bet- 
ter secured by inserting the cage in a comb near the brood, with 
room above for the bees to hover upon it. 
By making and keeping stocks queeuless, and feeding them 
when necessary, drones are retained for fertilizing queens late in 
the fall. By inducing the bees in such stocks to cluster outside, 
either by contracting the space inside, or leaning a piece of comb 
filled with capped brood against the entrance, drones will colled 
to such hives by thousands. 
