PREPARING BEES FOR CELL-BUILDING
METHOD NUMBER TWO
My favorite way of preparing bees for cell-building is given in Method No. 1. No doubt many will say they cannot do any thing of the kind; ’tis too fussy and takes too much time, etc. It is not fussy nor in any way difficult to perform. However, I will give two other methods for preparing bees for cell-building, making a colony queenless, etc.
We must start in the same as in case No. 1, that is, the sections must be removed the day previous.
Now proceed in the usual way of “drumming out” a swarm. The proper way to do this, and the way I practiced artificial swarming, or dividing a colony of bees, is as follows: Blow rottenwood smoke among the bees through the entrance; this so alarms the colony that all the bees commence to fill their sacs with honey. By drumming on sides of the hive, while smoking is being done, greatly helps in the operation.
When the bees seem ready to go up into the cap, more smoke should be introduced and a vigorous drumming on the hive kept up. In this way about two-thirds of the colony will run up into the cap. Now give them a few minutes to sort of settle down and become quiet. Remove the cap, invert it and throw a cloth over the box. Give the bees a few puffs of tobacco smoke under the cloth. In a few minutes the cloth can be removed, the queen hunted out and the bees dumped into a box same as described in Method No. 1.
By this plan bees, in either box or frame hives, can be utilized for queen-rearing. The queen can be re-introduced at once.
In a few hours, bees thus prepared, will be ready to build queen-cells and all that is necessary to do is to proceed as in case of No. 1.
METHOD NUMBER THREE
Early in the morning remove the queen from a populous colony. At night they will be in a proper condition for cell-building. When ready, prepare the eggs and queen-rearing hive as given above. Remove the queenless colony to a new stand, twenty feet away, and put the queen-rearing hive in its place. Now after arranging to brush the bees down in front of the latter hive, take out the combs of the queenless colony and brush or shake, at least one-half of the bees in front of the queen-rearing hive. They will all run in and at once commence to construct queen-cells, and the next day will be seen working just the same as if nothing had happened to them. The queen removed in the morning may be given back to the old colony.
This operation so depopulates the colony that little will be done in the supers for a week or ten days. But as the combs are filled with brood in all stages, and as the queen is with them, the stock will soon recover and get back in fine condition.
I have tried to make the above very clear. Of course it is all plain and easy to me, but how other people can translate it so as to understand it is the question. In none of the works I have published were the methods made so clear, but nearly all who read these books have stated that they had no trouble in rearing queens by the methods given.
The “Beekeepers’ Handy Book,” a work of nearly 200 pages, and “Thirty Years Among the Bees” were treatises on queen-rearing published by me within the last fifteen years. Some 5000 copies were issued and both books are now out of print.