Improved Queen-Rearing; or, How to Rear Large, Prolific, Long-Lived Queen Bees / The Result of Nearly Half a Century's Experience in Rearing Queen Bees, Giving the Practical, Every-day Work of the Queen-Rearing Apiary

by Henry Alley

DESCRIPTION OF PIPE FOR BURNING TOBACCO

I have always used tobacco smoke for light handling of bees, but more particularly for introducing queens.

I shall state here that for general use in the apiary tobacco is not the thing to burn. Doing light work and temporary use the tin pipe can be made to work all right. As I am constantly working in my queen-rearing apiary, I find tobacco smoke much the handiest, as well as the most convenient.

I do not wish any reader to think I recommend the filthy weed because I am a tobacco fiend. Although I have used the vile stuff in my apiary more than forty years, I have not been able to acquire the tobacco habit. So it will be seen that in order for me to use tobacco about my bees, I must have some special device to burn the stuff in.

I devised the pipe illustrated in fig. [13] many years ago. Body of pipe is about 6 inches long × ⅞ in. in diameter and made of tin. At each end is a wooden stopper, one a mouth piece, the other has a ¼ in. tin tube running through it and projecting about an inch beyond the wood through which the smoke is directed among the bees.

Figure 13

The pipe is filled with fine, dry tobacco, and is lighted by placing the small tube in the mouth and puffing away the same as any old smoker does when he puts fire to his old T. D. When the pipe is well fired up, the mouth piece is put in and all that is needed to break up a town meeting is to blow the breath through the pipe.

Full colonies of bees can be handled by using tobacco smoke, but they do not take kindly to it, and sometimes resent the insult with a vengeance.

A good bellows smoker filled with dry, rotten wood is much the best thing to use when opening a hive of bees. But in introducing queens and light work, in the apiary, the tin pipe will be found very valuable. Of course no one would think of using tobacco when extracting. In putting up queens I find the pipe very handy. It is held between the teeth, the cage in the left hand and the queen and bees handled with the right hand, as both hands are at liberty. Well, how handy!