58 THEODORE H. PRISON. 



Not too much of the diluted honey should be made up at one 

 time as it rapidly sours. I found it convenient to make up this 

 mixture by filling a four-ounce bottle about three fifths full of 

 honey, adding enough distilled water to nearly fill the bottle and 

 shaking it until the honey was thoroughly diluted. A cork 

 stopper provided with a medicine dropper. was useful for drawing 

 the diluted honey from the bottle and refilling the tin containers 

 in the nesting boxes. 



Besides liquid food, pollen is essential to a brooding queen for 

 her personal consumption and for the proper development of her 

 off-spring. Honeybee pollen is apparently as wholesome for 

 bumblebees as for honeybees. One spring I tried to secure fresh 

 pollen by removing the pollen from the corbiculse of worker 

 honeybees which I caught in the field. This required too much 

 time for the quantity secured; in fact, did not produce enough 

 for my needs. Therefore, I relied mainly upon getting the 

 pollen from the brood frames of the honeybee. The pollen 

 should be carefully removed, so as to avoid being mixed with 

 foreign substances, and kept in bottles until needed. If it dries 

 out it can be moistened again with honey. I am much indebted 

 to Dadant and Sons, of Hamilton, Illinois, for gratuitously 

 furnishing me with pollen in the spring of 1920. 



There is no actual difference between the pollen stored by the 

 honeybee and that of the bumblebee unless it be in the nature of 

 the substance or fluid used to moisten the pollen in order to 

 make it adhere to the pollen plate. This is evident from the 

 fact that much of the pollen gathered by both bumblebees and 

 honeybees is from the same flowers. 



Before using the pollen I mixed it with enough honey to give it 

 the consistency and plasticity of pollen freshly scraped from the 

 legs of a foraging bee. I then placed a lump of the pollen about 

 the size of a cherry seed in the artificial nest. This corresponded 

 to the pollen mass collected by a queen under natural conditions 

 when about to lay her first eggs. Besides this, I usually placed 

 a small amount of the pollen near the liquid food as an extra 

 source of pollen supply. That placed in the nest was intended 

 primarily for the queen to use in building her first egg cells, but 

 the use of this also as food did not complicate matters. 



