Practical Queen Rearing

by Frank Chapman Pellett

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

108 pages, Paperback

First published October 7, 2008

About the author

1879 - 1951

Reviews

[Emma Locke · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was published in 1918, so some of the information is outdated and would be highly questioned now. For instance, the writer recommends that if a beekeeper wants to requeen an entire apiary with pure stock, the beekeeper can requeen a single hive with a pure queen, raise enough queens from that hive to requeen the rest of the apiary, then after drones are being produced by those queens, to raise enough queens to requeen all those hives from the original queen again. However, modern knowledge would indicate that this scheme would result in inbreeding problems and diploid drone syndrome within the apiary.

Despite this, there are also some nuggets of advice, including pros and cons of using mating nucs versus full-sized nucs for mating, and the book certainly offers value as a historical study on beekeeping as the author presents many different methods for raising queens and most often tells who originally came up with each method.

[Scott · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skip this edition


The book itself is a classic, but it is dated. The real complaint I have is with this Kindle edition. It is clear the seller scanned and ocr'd a paper copy. Even that would be fine, except the ocr is poor and it's clear no attempt was made to clean it up. The page headers are still there, except they appear in the middle of pages. Blocks of ocr gibberish are all over.

[Matt Gee · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good start

A quick read with many of the basics are covered here. Although written some time ago, much of the lessons are practiced today.