JOURNAL OF HOETICULTUEE AND COTTAGE GAEDENEE. 



[ October 27, 1863. 



TWO QUEENS AT LIBERTY IN THE SAME 

 HIVE— LOSS OF THE QUEEN. 



Mb. "Woodbury has mentioned the death of the young 

 queen which he discovered at liberty in a stock possessing 

 a fertile queen. A few words on the history of the affair 

 may not be unacceptable to apiai'ians. 



Mr. Woodbm-y having kindly presented this young queen 

 to me, she was added to an artificial swaa-m on the 20th 

 of August. 



September 7th. — A considerable quantity of brood on one 

 comb. 



Sept. 16th. — Ditto on three combs. Queen is of a beautiful 

 colour. 



Sept. 18th.— Drove the bees of one of my stcis, kiUed the 

 queen, and united the bees to the artificial stock. With the 

 exception of seciu-ing the Ligiu-ian queen, every cai-e was 

 taken. No fighting whatever took place the first day, but 

 on the following one there was considerable, and the queen 

 was destroyed. 



Sept. 21st. — Eoyal cells making. The young Ligurians 

 out in large numbers, proving of fh-st-rate colour. 



Sept. 23rd. — Eoyal cells sealed. Added a common queen, 

 but the bees destroyed her dii-ectly. 



As it is so late in the season the young Ligurian queen 

 is probably by this time at liberty, but cannot be of any 

 service, and as I do not want to have any except drone- 

 breeding queens, she must be destroyed, and the bees united 

 to an adjoining hive. 



This disaster is the more vexing, as I have been in the 

 habit of uniting bees with impunity, having never before 

 experienced such a catastrophe as the loss of the reigning 

 queen, where the precaution was taken of removing the 

 stranger. Probably there is an antipathy between the two 

 varieties, which makes the operation more dangerous. The 

 swarm was populous enough to go through the winter, 

 and I ought to have been satisfied in leaving well alone. 

 It will be a lesson to me never to risk such an operation 

 where a valuable queen's life must be placed in jeopardy. 

 — S. Bevan Fox, Exeter. 



FOUL BEOOD— AN EXPEEIMENTAL APIAHY. 



I REALLY must unite with "B. & W.," the Hon. and 

 Eev. W. C. EUis, and many others who have protested 

 against the tone and style of Mx. Lowe's recent communi- 

 cations. 



It may, as he says, amuse old-fashioned as well as modern 

 apiai'ians to peruse his account of what we may of course 

 imagine to be his own doings, in the character of " the 

 Enigmatical and the Experimentalist," and it may certainly 

 throw some light on the nature of the so-called experiments 

 — save the mark ! — which have misled him in the matter of 

 foul brood. 



Although I have never done so, I wiU not deny that it 

 may be possible by means of mismanagement, so to paralyse 

 a colony of bees by an ovei-whelming quantity of chilled 

 brood, as to simulate some of the evils and not a little of the 

 appeai-ance of actual foul brood. And this is what Mr. Lowe 

 has evidently done. He first crushes the energies of his 

 iinfortunate bees by an overpowering mass of chilled brood, 

 and when they sink despau-ingly under the incubus, he 

 declai-es authoritatively that " decayed and abortive brood 

 in all stages are not removed by the bees, and consequently 

 must remain a jiermanent evil in whichever hive they are 

 unfortunately found." Having arrived at this satisfactory 

 conclusion, our experimentalist proceeds to relieve Iris mis- 

 erable bees fi'om the intolerable evil he has himself inflicted 

 on them; and when with the indomitable sjiirit of theii- race 

 they set to work to repair the ravages he has made, and 

 possibly even ultimately prosper in spite of liis iU-treatment, 

 he triumphantly announces that foul brood " is an evil with 

 which I have long been familiar," and " I have found that 

 excision of the affected parts is sufficient." That he is mis- 

 taken with regard to tlie general indisposition of bees to 

 remove chilled and therefore abortive brood I shall pre- 

 sently show ; that he is equally in error with regard to foul 

 brood being amenable to any such half-measiu'cs as he 

 describes has ah-eady been abundantly proved ; he wiU also 



in due time find this out for himself, whenever it may be his 



misfortune to meet with the true disease in his apiary. 



On the 19th of August, I perused Mr. Lowe's reprobation 

 of my proceedings in allowing brood to remain a dozen 

 hours in a warm kitchen, coupled with the assertion that 

 under such cu-cumstances foul and abortive brood would 

 foUow as a necessary consequence. There is something 

 almost provokiogly absurd in gravely expei-imenting for the 

 purpose of establishing a fact already so well known, and 

 one which in a few months' time the merest tyro in apiarian 

 matters may verify for himself by a cursoi-y examination of 

 the ground in front of a good stock after a sharp spring 

 frost ; but it so happened that I had by me a large piece of 

 comb crammed with brood in all stages (principally sealed), 

 which I had cut out of a hive in the North of Devon, four- 

 days previously, and which I had brought home and left 

 uncared-for in a fireless apartment. Here, then, was an 

 opportunity for an experiment — not certainly in Mr. Lowe's 

 slashing style, but quite sufficient for the purpose — and I 

 accordingly placed this comb — this mass of chilled and 

 abortive brood in all stages — in one of my colonies which 

 had only recently been cured of foul brood by the means 

 described by me in pages 97 and 98, and sneered at accord- 

 ingly by Mr. Lowe. What was the consequence ? The re- 

 appearance of foul brood ? No. Was the comb suil'ered to 

 hang a putrefying and con-upt body in the midst of an 

 inert and despau-ing population ? Not a bit of it. The bees 

 at once set to work and dragged out evei-y defunct embi-yo; 

 a few of the younger ones ones were, I believe, even hatched 

 after all this neglect. The queen deposited an egg in every 

 cell as soon as it was emptied, and all hatched out in due 

 coiu-se ; and the comb now worthily maintains its place as 

 part and parcel of the fm-nitm-e of a thorougldy healthy 

 stock. So much for Mr. Lowe's dictum so authoritatively 

 laid down. 



Having, therefore, refuted Mr. Lowe's singularly erroneous 

 assertions, the question of cui boiw? must necessarily arise; 

 and I would ask him in all seriousness, whether he believes 

 such proceedings as he has pourtrayed are likely to advance 

 the cause of apiarian science 's' I cai-e not whether it be, as 

 I have shown good reason for believing, a more or less 

 accurate description of his own manoeuvres, or whether he 

 intended it as a cai-icatui-e of what he imagines to be the 

 proceedings of others ; but I would ask if such an epistle as 

 his last is at aU likely to aid in developing the true principles 

 of apicultiu'e ? 



It is also to be regretted that Mr. Lowe has not responded 

 to his own appeal and been " candid for once." In page 304, 

 I took leave to correct one of his misstatements of my 

 words and meanmg. These are again so numerous in his 

 last article, that it would be tedious to particularise them. 

 I wiU, therefore, merely notice a couple of specimens. Fii-st, 

 then, I stated in page 97, that "Dzierzon declai-es that every 

 hive that has contained a foul-breeding colony should be 

 exposed to the suu and air for two years before being re- 

 stocked." This period Mr. Lowe has eularged to "four 

 years," appai-ently for no other purpose than that of 

 enabling him to ask u-onicaUy " Woidd not three years and 

 a h;Uf do ? " A few lines further on, he quotes, or rather 

 misquotes a sentence in inverted commas. Need I say that 

 a great part of that sentence was never written by me, and, 

 that as misquoted, it distorts and exaggerates my meaning? 



I have, I believe, conducted my share in this discussion 

 with fairness and moderation, and if Mr. Lowe will follow 

 my example, I shall be at all times ready and willing to 

 exchange with him, in the pages of The Journal or 

 Horticulture, the results of our mutual observations and 

 experience. If on tlie other hand he prefers endeavouring 

 either to snatch a questionable advantage, or to conceal a 

 defeat by resorting to misrepresentation and sarcasm, he 

 TviU neither be imitated nor again replied to by — A Devon- 

 shire Bee-keepek. 



Acclimatisation of Honey Bees. — Dr. A. Gertsacker, in 

 concluding a very extensive memoir on the distribution of 

 the honey bee, obseri^es that the most valuable form for 

 Europe would be the Egyptian, paa-tly on account of their 

 beauty and partly because of their unwillingness to use 

 their stings, wliich appears to be common to all Afi-ican bees. 



