At about ten o’clock in the morning of a calm, clear day, when the young queen is at least two days old, I feed the bees of the nucleus with diluted honey. Drones and queens will then almost invariably issue at the same time, and before common drones from other colonies or neighboring apiaries are on the wing. Thus both disappointment and delay are in a great measure precluded. I do not stimulate the bees of the nucleus by feeding either on the first or the second day after a young queen has left her cell, because she is then yet too feeble to make an excursion with safety. But I have frequently succeeded in having fertilization effected on the third or fourth day, in favorable weather, when the nucleus thus stimulated contained both drones and queen; and in many cases the queens began to lay on the third or fourth day thereafter. In this way, I not only obtain many (I do not say all) purely fertilized queens; but also very superior ones, large, vigorous, and prolific, producing both workers and drones well marked and brightly colored. I do not indeed claim that this process gives us absolute certainty, but only a very great probability, that the queens we rear will be purely fertilized. Other bee-keepers too, who employed it long before the Kœhler method was promulgated, regard it as furnishing the most likely means of assuring success. Thus, for instance, the President of the Bee-keeper’s Union of Moravia, Dr. Ziwanski, who is not a blind imitator of others, but a careful and indefatigable inquirer, never recommending aught for adoption till he has himself tested it with success, found my method worthy of adoption five years ago already, for his annual report for 1865 contains the following passage:--