792 



AMERICAN BEE JOUPNAL. 



Dec. 12, 1901. 



can now be taken away and destroyed. This 

 must be done only through a heavy flow. 



Inspector Evans. 



.Another cure for foul brood is as 

 follows : Take equal parts of carbolic 

 and salicylic acids, saturate a flannel 

 cloth and put it between two thin boards, 

 so that the bees can not touch the flan- 

 nel or acid. Put this in the place of 

 center frame of the hive, removing the 

 frame. 



Mr. Gardner gave an interesting sketch 

 of a bee-house 9x28 feet and 7 feet high, 

 holding over 100 colonies. He manip- 

 ulates his bees in the house, keeping 

 them in it winter and summer. He 

 has three tiers of hives on each side 

 of the house, running north and south. 

 The house is built with tight board 



rustic. The hives are pushed up against 

 the boards of the house, with the en- 

 trances opposite corresponding holes cut 

 in the boards. The walls are painted 

 several colors, in perpendicular stripes, 

 after the style of a barber pole, each 

 stripe being the width of a hive. In 

 this way the bees have no trouble locat- 

 ing their hives. He says the house has 

 proven a success with him, the bees 

 being eai;y to handle, with much less 

 work, and his loss in winter, so far, 

 has not exceeded five per cent. 



The honey crop in Uintah County was 

 short, on account of a small, white, 

 flying insect, the insect being very nu- 

 merous in all nectar-producing bloom. 

 The pest made its first appearance 

 July I, and remained until the bloom 

 was killed by frost. 



Mr. Neilson gave a very interesting 

 description of a moth-trap he has in- 

 vented for the destruction of the cod- 

 dling moth and other insect pests. He 

 stated that by this method the moth 

 and its eggs can be caught and des- 

 troyed at the same time, which makes 

 it much more effective than spraying. He 

 said the old-time poison spray had never 

 been a success, and never could be, 

 because of the small percentage of 

 larvs caught — Often not more than two 

 per cent — and the harm done often 

 exceeded the benefits derived. He was 

 sustained in this view by several practi- 

 cal fruit growers present, some of whom 

 said they had given up poison spraying 

 as an expensive luxury, and not worth 

 following. 



Contributed Articles. I 



^'sm- 



Long-Ton§ued Honey-Bees. 



Head at tlie rn-eiit (\,lunulu Ila-Knjnr.s' (Juiimiithjii at l)i, 

 BY PROF. C. P. GILLETTE, 

 of tlie Colorado Agricultural College, at Fort Collins. 



Who first suggested breeding for long-tongued honey-bees, 

 I do not know. It is said that a Mr. Wankler. of Germany, 

 invented an instrument as early as 1882, for the purpose of 

 measuring the length of bees' tongues. So far as I have 

 been able to learn, the first person to bring this matter 

 prominently before the bee-keepers of this country was Mr. 

 J. M. Rankin, of the Michigan Experiment Station, at pres- 

 ent foul-brood inspector for that State. Mr. Rankin at- 

 tempted to breed up a long-tongued strain of bees and be- 

 lieved that his efforts were crowned with some measure of 

 success. 



During the past year, or eighteen months, the subject of 

 "long-tongued" or "red-clover" bees has been greatly agi- 

 tated in the bee-journals of the country and has come to be 

 a veritable fad. A person having queens to sell feels that 

 he IS greatly behind the times— a sort of back number in 

 this age of progress— unless he can guarantee his queens to 

 produce a long-tongued variety of worker-bees. The result 

 is, he so advertises them without knowing the real facts 

 in the case, but with the belief that his bees have tongues 

 as long as any. 



To a student of biology, particularly if he be an ento- 

 mologist, the idea of a long-tongued race of honey-bees 

 coming quickly into existence, seems extremely impro'bable. 

 There is no more important organ in the anatomy of the 

 honey-bee than its tongue for the maintenance of life, and 

 nature has been breeding this tongue to a standard length 

 for so long a time that it is not likely to vary rapidly under 

 artificial selection where parentage can be controlled upon 

 one side only. For these reasons the writer took no in- 

 terest in the matter when it was first agitated. Finally, so 

 many bee-keepers of known honesty and sincerity of pur- 

 pose began to advocate breeding for long-tongued bees, and 

 to advertise that they had such bees for sale, that it seemed 

 necessary that some one, having the facilities and the nec- 

 essary training, should make a careful study of the subject 

 and report results. The writer began to collect bees for 

 the purpose of testing tongue-length early last summer. It 

 was not possible to spare a large amount of time for this 

 purpose, but I feel warranted in making this preliminary 

 report, and am expecting to publish a fuller one after con- 

 tinuing the work farther. 



WHAT IS MEANT BY TONGUE-LENGTH ? 



The so-called "tongue" of the honey-bee is a very highly 

 specialized organ made up of many parts. The longest 

 single piece is the ligula, which is very flexible, yellowish 

 in color, and thickly set with short hairs. Into this the 

 nectar of the flower is first taken. It is supported by a 



black, rigid, chitinous piece called the mcntum, which is 

 about one-third as long as the lingula. At the base of the 

 mentum is a still shorter piece which is also, hard and rigid 

 — the sub-mentum — and this is attached to the underside of 

 the head by two slender, stiff rods, jointed at the middle 

 and known as the cardos or hinges. These medium parts 

 with the attached portions (the two sets of palpi and the max- 

 illa:) make up the parts of the tongue. The important qi'es- 

 tion which presents itself here is. What shall we base our 

 measurements upon in giving tongue length? 



In breeding for long-tongued bees what one would want 

 to know is the distance the tongue can be made to reach 

 beyond the jaws or mandibles — "the tongue-reach," as it 

 has been called. This is the measure which has been given 

 by i\Ir. Root and most others, so far as I know, who have 

 reported lengths of bees' tongues. 



Glossometers also have been constructed to measure this 

 tongue-reach in the living bee. This seems to me like 

 endeavoring to determine how far a man can rench above 

 his head. If we could catch him putting forth his utmost 

 efforts to reach in that direction, and could get him to hold 

 still long enough, we could determine the distance with con- 

 siderable accuracy. On the other hand, when we have to 

 determine this point from measurements of the dead 

 or chloroformed body we can not obtain very accu- 

 rate results. We would not know how hard to 

 pull upon the arm just to draw it into the 

 position of the highest reach ; and if we should not pull 

 upon it, it would, from the elasticity of the parts, draw 

 down much too far. The conditions are worse in case of 

 the elastic and many-jointed tongue of a bee. It would 

 be true, as a rule, that the longer the arm, the farther a 

 person could reach above his head, and it would lie much 

 more certainly true that the longer the tongue of a bee, the 

 farther can it reach beyond its mandibles, as the ratios be- 

 tween parts in a bee are far more consant than in man. 

 For this reason, and for the further reason that it is more 

 easy to get an accurate measurement of the parts of the 

 tongue when it is dissected completely out and placed upon 

 a glass slide under a compound microscope, I have con- 

 sidered the entire tongue-length the best measurement upon 

 which to base conclusions as to tongue-reach. 



I believe, for practical purposes, it may always be con- 

 sidered true that the bee with the longest tongue has the 

 longest possible tongue-reach. As the man with the shorter 

 arm-reach might secure more persimmons from the tree 

 than his longer-armed but less active brother, so the bee 

 with shorter tongue-reach may excel her less industrious sis- 

 ter in collecting nectar from flowers. 



In my first measurements, tongue-length only was taken 

 into account, but in the later ones the tongue-reach, so near 

 as I could measure it. was also recorded. An examination 

 of the figures in the following table will show a far greater 

 variation in the latter measurements than in the former. If 

 the tongue-reach seemed too short when first measured, I 

 could usually increase it by two or three hundredths of an 

 inch by a little careful stretching. I do not mean a real 

 stretching, but a straightening of the joints of the cardos so 

 as to extend the tongue forward as shown in the illustration. 

 The tongue will not remain in this position unless held there. 



HOW TO KILL THE BEES. 



Chloroform, alcohol, formalin, cyanide of potassium, and 

 boiling water, were all experienced with to determine the 



