No. 7. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE. 507 



fruit grower to bear the bees in mind when planning his spraying 

 work. The blossoms should not be sprayed until the petals begin 

 tc fall. 



Fortunately for the fruit grower and thanks to modern appa- 

 ratus and the present knowledge of bee life, the Keeping of bees 

 is no longer as complicated or dangerous as was once the case. It 

 is not necessary to be severely stung to keep bees and secure their 

 products. Improved races of bees, of which the Italians are the 

 most generally desirable, are very much more gentle and easily 

 handled than the common black or German bee and its crosses. 

 A veil or face protector of some kind is desirable generally, al- 

 though not always necessary. I have worked all day in large bee 

 yards protected only by light summer clothing and wearing low 

 shoes, sleeves rolled up, and a large straw hat, without receiving 

 a sting. Any veil used should be black in color, otherwise the light 

 will be reflected as to make it impossible to see through with 

 ease. A broad brim hat is always an advantage because a bee al- 

 ways hesitates to fly beneath the brim. 



More important than a veil and what can rarely be done with- 

 out, is smoke. This is made by burning any suitable substance in 

 an apparatus called a smoker, consisting of a fire pot and bellows 

 attached from which smoke can be directed and blown where want- 

 ed. I find oily or fresh "waste" most satisfactory for smoker fuel. 

 Smoke scares the bees. When scared, bees immediately fill them- 

 selves with honey, and for some reason, when they are filled with 

 honey they are much less inclined to sting and can be handled more 

 freely. Providing no individual boe id p n-^ied, bet-- once scared 

 and filled with honey may be freely handled and even picked up 

 by handfuls. A colony of bees consists of a queen, a few hundred 

 drones, perhaps, and several thousand worker bees. The queen is 

 a fully developed female, lays the eggs which produce all the other 

 bees, and while she has a sting, uses it against a rival queen only. 

 The drones are the males, and they do not have any sting. The 

 workers are undeveloped females, which gather honey, secrete wax, 

 build comb and rear the young. They are each provided with a 

 sting. A queen can lay as many as 4,000 eggs in 24 hours, which 

 is more than twice her weight. She can control the sex of her off- 

 spring, and lays two kinds of eggs, drone and worker eggs. Drone 

 eggs are unfertilized — hence the drone has no male parent. The 

 ability of the queen to produce vital unfertilized eggs is called 

 "parthenogenouses," 



Bees build two kinds of cells in the comb— drone cells and worker 

 cells. Worker eggs are laid in worker cells and drone eggs in 

 drone cells. As the bee keeper desires to prevent as much as 

 possible the production of drones, he wishes to prevent the produc 

 tion of drone cells. Combs are built from wax which is secreted in 

 scales from glands on the under side of the abdomen of the worker. 

 The larvae in the comb cells are fed from the mouths of workers 

 with a material called ''chyle" which is placed in the cells about 

 them. Queens are reared in a specially constructed cell from worker 

 eggs by a special process of feeding. In order to prevent the 

 overproduction of drone cells and hence of drones the boe keeper 

 uses sheets of wax so marked by machines as to be like the mid- 

 rib of a comb. These wax sheets are called "foundation." Only 



