Or howto Realize the Most Money with the Smallest Expenditure of Capital 
and Labor in the Care of Bees, Rationally Considered. 
PUBIilSIIED MONTHLY. 
Yon. I. MEDINA, O., AUG. 1, 1873. No. 8. 
STARTING AN Al'IAItY. 
No. 8. 
“rajBESUMING our friends have all stic- 
— 1) ceeded in extracting all the honey 
that has been gathered, satisfactorily to 
themselves at least, thus far, we shall re- 
commend now that steps be taken at once 
to rear queens. (We are presuming these 
remarks will reach you about Aug. 1st.) 
Whether we rear queens to replace those 
not sufficiently prolific or for making new 
colonies, we want just the eerg best we 
ran. have, and in giving directions for so 
doing we shall confine ourselves to such 
processes as are least likely to fail, and 
have been fully tested. 
In the first place assuming that among 
bees “like produces like," we would ask 
every one of our readers to mentally de- 
cide which is his very best queen, i. e., 
which one invariably fills her hive with 
brood early in the season and as surely 
gives you a large yield of honey. At the 
same time we would have this progeny 
show the three yellow bands as an indica- 
tion of Italian blood if possible, yet bear- i 
ing in mind that when we are obliged to 
select stock to rear queens from our own 
apiary, we should consider it better to 
rear from a very prolific queen nut pure , 
than to use a queen producing very light 
colored bees though not very prolific. 
This advice may be qualified somewhat 
by those who very much fear stings, but 
as we are to “make the most money" at 
all hazards, we shall have to make stings 
a secondary consideration, and rest as- 
sured that you will all in time learn to 
fear stings but little. If you are so for- 
tunate as to have a queen, very prolific, 
producing three banded bees, and these 
of a quiet disposition, too, consider her 
worth $25.00 at least, for we have found 
such queens quite rare ; our most prolific 
ones oftencst produce cross hybrids. 
During poor seasons we welieve the full 
blood Italians invariably gather more 
honey according to their number than the 
hybrids, and to conclude we should dis- 
like to rear many queens from a queen 
that we had not previously tested our- 
selves. We would have an imported 
queen if we could afford it, because we 
should then be sure of having a pure 
mother, but did she not prove prolific we 
should use some other, perhaps one of her 
daughters. 
Having carefully decided on your best 
colony, we now wish you to point out 
your least profitable, in all points enum- 
erated, i. e. diametrically the opposite of 
your best. 
If your apiary contains fifty hives or 
more you can probably find one so poor 
that her head had better be taken off at 
once, no matter if she is pure Italian. 
Some, we are sorry to say, knowingly 
sell such queens, thereby doing much to 
deteriorate the reputation r.f the Italians, 
for all such stocks are sure to die out un- 
der the old order of things and are con- 
sequently never or rarely permitted to 
reproduce themselves. We shotdd be 
very careful that we do notsubvert nature 
by carefully nursing unprolific queens 
that would otherwise die before they could 
have a chance of perpetuating their poor 
qualities, simply because they produce 
three banded workers. 
Assuming that introducing queens is 
always risky (we shall treat this subject 
in future) we will avoid the necessity of so 
doing by “swapping" all the In-ood combs 
of our first mentioned colony for an equal 
number from the latter. This should give 
us at this season of the year from fifteen 
to twenty queen cells, and you arc to 
count them carefully in just one week 
from the date of making the exchange. 
Now if you have in you apiary so 
many queens that arc not good ones, re- 
move and destroy them the same day that 
the cells are counted. A very plain test 
of what we call a “good queen" is to des- 
troy all that are not working in an upper 
story at this date, presuming that had 
there been no more than a pint of bees 
April 1st, she should before Aug. 1st have 
made a good colony, and if she has not 
done this we would throw her away and 
try another. In two days more or in 
nine days from the time our cells were 
started we will insert a cell in each of the 
queenless colonies, and to avoid ns far as 
