356 Journal op the Department of Agriculture. 



dequeeniug- a liive for a few days and then requeening with a vigorous 

 young Italian queen. During the time the hive is queenless, the 

 workers have an opportunity of removing all dead and djdng larvae, 

 and of thoroughly cleaning out the contaminated cells. When the 

 young queen is introduced, she rapidly builds up the depleted colony 

 and restores it to its normal strength. One of the essentials, then, 

 for the success of this remedy is an instinct among the bees for keep- 

 ing the hive scrupulously clean. According to the writer's experience, 

 the adansoni race is excellent in this respect. In the observation 

 hive at Cedara there is an army of bees constantly at work licking 

 the glass and woodwork clean of all impurities. Frames containing 

 mouldy pollen and perforated in all directions by the burrows of 

 wax-moth larvae are cleaned up and repaired in a few hours when 

 placed in the midst of a strong colonj^ 



G. W. Onions, workijig alone and also in conjunction with the 

 Rhodesian entomologist, R. W. Jack, has proved that the black or 

 uni color race of bees will often, during a queenless period, produce 

 fertile workers capable of laying worker eggs and even of producing 

 queens. Therefore, rendering a hive of these bees queenless would 

 often prove useless as a remedial measure against foul-brood, for 

 there would be little or no break in the brood-rearing to give the bees 

 a chance to clean up. The yellow-banded or adonsoni race does not 

 seem to possess this characteristic, for in all queenless colonies 

 inspected by the writer, where fertile workers were present, only drone 

 brood was found. Fvirthermore, fertile workers are not common 

 among this latter race and seem only to api^ear after a colony has 

 been queenless for some days. Thus it would appear that, apart from 

 their gentler nature, the adansoni bees are preferable as regards their 

 powers of combating European foul-brood, and this race, by far the 

 commoner one of the two, is the one that should be concentrated upon 

 in breeding experiments. 



One would imagine that the Italian blood imported years ago 

 would have left its mark on the bees found here to-day, but such does 

 not appear to be the case. The writer has carefully examined bees 

 from Capetown, Durban, Pietermaritzburg, and Pretoria, and they 

 were all found to belong to the types shown in the illustrations. In 

 1862 Dr. Gerstaecker, a German authority on bees, gave detailed 

 descriptions of the different types of honey-bees found in South 

 Africa, and these descriptions fit accurately the types found here 

 to-day. Recently some bees were sent from Natal to T. D. A. Cockerell, 

 an American authoritjr, and he pronounced them to be A. adansoni 

 and A. unicolor. vSome specimens were also sent to Dr. Peringuey, 

 the Director of the South African Museum, for comparison with the 

 material in the museum, and his remarks concerning them are of 

 such interest that they may be quoted here in full. In a letter to the 

 writer he says, inter alia: "I received the bees you sent me for 

 identification. The latter is not easy. As you are aware, there is in 

 Southern Europe a race called ligiistica, or in common parlance, 

 Italian bees, as opposed to common black, or German bee, mcllifica. 

 According to H. von Buttel Reepen, a recent German authority, 

 there are three sub-species of the common honey-bee, namely, Apis 

 rtiellifica : sub-species indica, sub-species unicolor, and sub-species 

 mellijica. The sub-species indica has six varieties, none of which 

 occurs in Africa. Unicolor has five varieties, all of which are 



