QUEEN-REARING 
lie can take out of a nursery, lie can quick¬ 
ly make good the loss. 
The nursery cage here shown has a large 
opening at the top to receive the wooden 
cell cup; the small hole in the lower right- 
hand corner is filled with queen-cage candy 
Nursery cage for cells and virgins. 
to supply the young miss after she emerges. 
Twenty-four of these cages, supplied with 
cells that are capped over, can be put in a 
nursery-frame having holders which may 
be tilted on an angle so that any one cage 
can be easily removed from a holder with- 
A nursery frame. 
out disturbing the rest. There are three of 
these holders in each frame, pivoted at both 
ends as shown. When the nursery-frame 
has been filled with cages, each containing 
a capped cell, it should be put down in the 
center of a strong colony. 
While various artificial-heat incubators 
using kerosene lamps or electric heaters 
have been devised, experience has shown a 
majority of breeders that nothing is quite 
so good as a strong cluster of bees. What is 
still more, when the young virgins emerge, 
some of the bees will be inclined to feed 
them thru the wire cloth, providing a 
stimulus that they cannot receive from the 
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queen candy in the cage. After the vir¬ 
gins have emerged they should be trans¬ 
ferred to introducing cages, and intro¬ 
duced as soon after emerging as possible. 
The younger the virgin, the more success¬ 
ful will be her introduction. After she 
becomes four or five days old, even if she 
be accepted by the bees they are likely 
to mistreat her so that her usefulness there¬ 
after will be greatly impaired. While it is 
possible to introduce these virgins to full- 
sized colonies it is not practicable except 
by the use of the Smith cage or smoke or 
distress method described under Introduc¬ 
ing. It is much easier to .introduce to baby 
nuclei. 
DUAL PLAN OF INTRODUCING VIRGIN QUEENS 
FOR EXTENSIVE BREEDERS. 
It sometimes happens that a breeder will 
have a great surplus of cells, or more 
virgins than he has queenless nuclei or 
colonies. In such cases it has been found 
practicable to introduce two queens at a 
time. First a virgin, the younger the bet¬ 
ter, is introduced in a Miller cage to a baby 
nucleus. After two or three days she should 
be released; in about four days more, being 
seven days from the time of caging the first 
queen, another virgin may be caged among 
the same bees; but the candy of the second 
cage thru which the bees liberate the queen 
must be covered with a little strip of tin or 
the bees will liberate her prematurely. In 
two days more the first virgin will be mated, 
and within two or three days will begin to 
lay if the weather is favorable, when she is 
removed and sent out to fill an order. The 
strip of tin covering the candy of the sec¬ 
ond cage is opened to let the bees release 
virgin No. 2, and, having already acquired 
the colony odor, she will usually be ac¬ 
cepted in less than a day’s time. In about 
seven days from the time she was caged, a 
third queen, if there is still a surplus of 
virgins, may be put into the nucleus while 
No. 2 is taking her mating-flight, and so 
the progress may continue so long as there 
is a surplus of virgins. 
This is really high-pressure queen-rear¬ 
ing, and should be practiced only when 
there is a surplus of virgins, or when there 
are rush orders for cheap queens—cheap 
queens, because the queens introduced on 
the dual plan may or may not be the equal 
