MillerThousand AnswersBeekeepingQuestions.pdf - BioBees

THOUSAND ANSWERS 75A. Any time. Prevention, however, is better than cure. Allowvery little drone-comb in your hives and you'll have few drones.For greater safety to the queen. If there was only one dronefor each queen, the queen might make many trips before mating.Drumming.—Q. What do you mean, in answering queries, by"drumming" the bees out of a hive in transferring, and how is itdone? Is it knocking on the sides or top, and for how long, andhow hard? Do you use just the fingers, or fist, or stick?A. Turn a hive upside down, drum on the sides of the hivewith your fists or a heavy stick on the opposite sides, and if youdrum long enough with heavy strokes you will set the bees torunning up into whatever is placed over. No light tapping withyour fingers will do, neither with the fists, unless strong andheavy.Dummies.—Q. What are dummies? What is their constructionand use ?A. Take a top-bar and nail a board on so that the length ofthe board is the same as the length of a frame, and the depth oftop-bar and all the same as the depth of frame, top-bar and all.That's your dummy. It may be an inch thick, or anything lessdown to one-quarter inch. It is used to fill up any space desired,and especially at one side of a hive. If no dummy is in the hiveit is hard to get out the first frame, if the frames are self-spacingor fixed-distance frames. If there is a space filled with a dummyat one side, it is easy to take out the dummy, and then easy totake out any desired frame.(See also Division-Boards.)Q. You are often called upon to explain what dummies are,how they are made, and how used in the hives. In confining asmall colony to one side of the hive, do you fill the empty spacewith anything?A. A weak colony, say one that needs only four frames, mayhave a dummy at one side of the frames with the remaining spacein the hive left entirely vacant; only the dummy must be movedand a frame or frames added as needed. Generally, however,when one has a weak colony of that kind which is expected tobuild up, one has enough empty combs to fill up the hive, and inthat case I wouldn't use a duirimy at all. You may ask whetherthe bees would not be warmer to have the combs that are occupiedshut ofif from the empty combs by a dummy. One would naturallythink so, yet experiments carefully made, if I remember rightly,