FIRST IMPROVEMENTS IN QUEEN-REARING
I shall not claim that any very great improvements have been made in the quality of queens reared by the methods given here.
Having told you how queens were reared in the early days of the queen-rearing business, I can now only give the process of doing the work in other ways by improved methods. It will be understood that after the advent of the movable-comb hive, bee-keeping took on a rapid move. The second advance of importance was made when Mr. J. B. Parsons of Flushing, N. Y., imported some Italian bees. It was soon noised all over the United States that the yellow-banded bees were better than the common black ones, or the German bee.
At this time many bee-keepers were in condition to rear queens and they did so, and thus the queen-rearing and supply business has been on the increase since the year 1862, or the advent of the Italian bee. We all had, or thought we had, a lot of “know how.” Whether we had the know how or not, no one experienced any trouble in rearing good queens, all being satisfactory except in purity. Every one who purchased Italian queens expected them to throw all three-banded bees, and it was found almost impossible to get a breeding queen that could be called strictly pure. There was no fixed purity to the Italians; they were and are to this day nothing but a hybrid strain of bees. With the exception of purity everything went on smoothly in queen rearing.
Although some improvement has been made in the purity of the Italians, there are very few pure queens reared; and bee-keepers continue to find fault with the queens they purchase if there happens to be even but a dozen “one-banded” bees in a large colony.