INCREASE. 



285 



INTKUDUCING. 



and warm, and feeding- them a little thin warm sj'rui) 

 nearly every day for the first thirty days sifter they 

 have commenced to fly, you can have two good 

 strong colonies in the place of one ready to commence 

 work on your clover harvest, which here com- 

 mences about June 15. 



From an extensive experience along tliis linel find 

 I can get nearly twice the amount of surplus by di- 

 viding as above stated over what I was able to ac- 

 quire either by letting them go undivided or divid- 

 ing in a way that caused the loss of a greater part 

 of their brood. This losing of brood we must guard 

 against at all times if we expect to secure a fine sur- 

 plus. It costs both time and honey to produce it, 

 and it is the principal factor in obtaining those 

 strong colonies that give us tons of honey. 



Far too many bee-keepers think that the value of 

 their apiary consists in the number of colonies they 

 keep. This is so only to a certain extent; for if you 

 had 1000 colonies and they were all weak in bees, so 

 they would give you no surplus, they would not be 

 worth as much as one good strong colony that would 

 give you 200 or 300 pounds of honey. 



Several years ago one of my sons bought nine 

 colonies of bees in common box hives, about the 

 first of June. He brought them home and trans- 

 ferred them at once to movable-frame hives, and in 

 about three weeks divided them, making 20 colonies 

 of the 9 he bought, using some queen-cells I had on 

 hand for his surplus colonies. He then attended to 

 those 20 colonies so they were all strong at the com- 

 mencement of our buckwheatjiarvest. I then lent 

 him 20 hives of empty combs to put on top of his 

 colonies to extract from. He took 2849 lbs. of ex- 

 tracted honey from those 9 colonies and their in- 

 crease, and left them in good condition so every one 

 came out the next spring in fine order. 



Another son, the same season, took one colony, 

 divided into three, and received 347 lbs. of extracted 

 honey. They also came through the following 

 winter in good condition. I speak of these cases 

 simply to show that it is not necessary to keep hun- 

 dreds of colonies in order to get a little honey. If 

 you will keep only strong colonies and give them 

 the best of care you will soon find both pleasure 

 and profit in bee-keeping. 



Now, in regard to the criticism on this way of 

 making our Increase, which has been published in 

 Gleanings. I find that nearly all who have made a 

 failure of the method have taken colonies that had 

 already made some preparations for swarming by 

 having eggs or larvae in their queen-cells, as did J. 

 D. Ronan, of Chesterville, Miss., and also Don Mills' 

 of Highland, Mich. 



During the summer I received a few letters from 

 parties who had made a failure of this method in 

 about the same way. Some had taken colonies that 

 had capped queen-cells in their hives at the time 

 they put the queen in the under hive, and, of course, 

 they swarmed in a day or two. I can not see that 

 thpse failures are any proof of fault in the method. 

 When we work with our bees we must always use 

 some discretion in such matters. If a colony is very 

 strong in bees it certainly requires dilferent man 

 agement from one rather weak. 



INTRODUCirrG. ruder normal t^on- 

 ditioiis only one qneen will he tolerated in 

 a colony at a time. Should there by acci- 

 dent be two, when they meet there is likely 



to be a royal battle, until one of them 

 is killed. So it happens that qtieens are, 

 as a rule, jealous rivals; but there are ex- 

 ceptions. Under certain conditions (as when 

 an old queen is about to be superseded) when 

 the young daughter may be tolerated in the 

 hive along with her mother— both laying 

 side by side; but in the course of a few days 

 or weeks the mother will be missing. 

 Whether she dies of old age or the daughter 

 kills her we do not know. There are other 

 conditions where two and sometimes a doz- 

 en queens will be permitted to stay in the 

 hive, but under circumstances which seem 

 to be abnormal. 



Again, it may be stated that a normal col- 

 ony of bees will not take a strange queen, 

 even though they liave no mother of their 

 own, much less will they accept an interlo- 

 per when there is already a queen in the hive. 

 We may, therefore, lay it down as a rule 

 that has exceptions,* like all other good 

 rules, that we can not introdtice any queen, 

 young or old, to a colony that already has 

 one. Moreover, bees that have been sud- 

 denly deprived of a queen will not. un- 

 der ordinary conditions, accept another, no 

 matter how much they may need one, until 

 she has been "introduced.'' It follows, 

 then, in the process of requeening we are 

 compelled to put a new queen in a wire-cloth 

 cage and confine her there (where the other 

 bees can not attack her) until she has ac- 

 quired the same colony odor or individual 

 scent as the bees themselves. This usually 

 takes two or three days, at the end of which 

 time the queen may be released and they 

 will treat her as their own royal mother. 

 We do not know how bees recognize each 

 other, or how they can tell a strange queen 

 from their own, except by scent factor. 



It is a fact well recognized that a dog can 

 pick out his master from hundreds of others 

 through the agency of scent; nay, further, 

 he can track him if he loses sight of him by 

 catching the scent of where he has walked, 

 in spite of the fact that hundreds of other 

 people may have gone over the same ground. . 

 This scent that is so acute in a dog is un- 

 doubtedly highly developed in the bee, oth- 

 erwise we should be at a loss to account for 

 some of the phenomena in the domestic 

 economy of the hive. See Scent op Bees. 



*If a virgin queen, on returning from a mating- 

 trip, enters by mistake a hive where there is an old 

 laying queen she may, and very often does, sup- 

 plant the old queen. The virgin is young and vigor- 

 ous, and mute tli;m a nintc-h for the old queen full 

 ofeg>!S. R\cn though 1 lie colony odor be lacking, 

 the bees in this c;isc aecept the supplanter. 



