Publisher's Synopsis
From the Author's PREFACE:
THIS is the second edition of my queen book. The first edition I used the title "HOW TO GROW QUEENS FOR 15c EACH." This led to confusion as many customers could not get through their head that this 15 cents was the production cost of queens when using this system, and not the selling price of the book.
However, the cost of everything has varied so widely in the last few years and as there is liable to be a wide variation in the future, I am going to be content to just call this book, HOW TO GROW QUEENS.
In the last 25 years, men under my direction have grown many hundred thousand queens and I find little that I can change or improve about this book. We follow this system, as it produces the best results for us with the least effort and expense. Practice tends to make perfect, and you will find that the longer you use this system, the easier and better it will work.
Northern beekeepers tell me that even by using my system they cannot profitably afford to grow their own queens because this takes time, bees and equipment that they can more profitably use in the production of honey.
Probably most of the queens will always be produced in the south because there queen rearing operations start in early March and continue through October. The early queens are used largely with package bee shipments and by late May there is a surplus of queens that can be sold cheaper than the northern breeders can afford to produce them.
Now with air mail rapidly extending its services throughout the country and the world, quick, safe delivery is the rule rather than the exception. A few years ago we could not safely ship queens to California by rail, but now we fly them there over night and they also arrive in good order in Europe, Africa and South America.
