582 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



Sept. 15 



BREEDING ENTIRELY FROM ONE QUEEN 

 IN A SEASON. 



Do we Require an Island Apiary for Breeding 

 the Best Queens? 



BY SAMUEL SIMMINS. 



In my 1888 edition, and in each succeed- 

 ing issue of my book, I stated that "unre- 

 stricted or indiscriminate swarming is to- 

 tally at variance with all true principles of 

 breeding. To obtain the best results it is 

 absolutely necessary that all queens be 

 carefully bred from the best stock only." 



I believe most advanced bee-keepers are 

 now agreed upon these points; but many 

 do not follow the plan set out in the last 

 sentence. It will be observed that all 

 queens are to be reared for the season from 

 one stock, or, to be more explicit, from just 

 one queen only. In my own practice I go 

 further than this, for, while breeding the 

 whole of my queens for any one season from 

 one selected queen only, I also rear my 

 drones for the same period from the daugh- 

 ter or granddaughter of one other queen 

 which was used for producing the queens in 

 some preceding year. In this way I have 

 been able to register a pedigree strain for 

 the lasL ten years through the male parent- 

 age as well as the descent of the queen- 

 rearing mothers, thus securing all the most 

 desirable traits in a fixed strain of honey- 

 gatherers. 



Thus, if once in two or three years I find 

 one among a number imported has some 

 very desirable trait worth appropriating she 

 is used for rearing queens one year, and in 

 succeeding years her granddaughter, whose 

 parent and grandparent were also mated to 

 my pedigree drones, will carry the com- 

 bined qualities forward in the male line. 

 In occasionally bringing in one of my own 

 home-reared queens, already in the line of 

 pedigree stock, as a queen-mother for the 

 season, she has been under close observa- 

 tion for at least the whole of one season, or 

 it may be between two and three seasons, 

 maintaining certain good qualities without 

 variation. The practice of allowing bees to 

 swarm, and leaving their own selection of 

 young queens to follow, is as bad as that of 

 allowing stocks to supersede queens at their 

 own sweet will. Moreover, in the average 

 apiary drones are allowed to be reared in a 

 number of stocks, while queens are bred 

 from several mothers during the same sea- 

 son. No wonder, then, that the apiarist, 

 whether he be a honey-producer or queen- 

 rearer, is pretty much at a standstill, or 

 finds his stocks sometimes just a little bet- 

 ter, or more often a great deal worse, than 

 the average. 



I am able to state from long experience 

 that there is no hope of securing genuine 



progress as regards standard breeding stock, 

 and hence, for all purposes, where more 

 than one queen-mother is used for the sea- 

 son, or more than one other queen for 

 drones during the same year. Further- 

 more, that no fixed strain, having all-round 

 desirable traits, will be secured where the 

 pedigree is not definitely registered through 

 the drone-mother succession, even more 

 than by the registration of the queen moth- 

 ers, though that, of course, can not be neg- 

 lected. 



AIDS TO ISOLATION. 



Now, is isolation on some island, or with- 

 in some large unoccui:)ied area, really nec- 

 essary? The unoccupied locality might be 

 difficult to find, or, if found, would perhaps 

 be inconveniently situated; while a small 

 island would probably be equally incon- 

 venient, possibly a very windy spot, and 

 at the same time the bees would most like- 

 ly require feeding all the time with both 

 syrup and artificial pollen. This process 

 would not only be costly, but certainly pro- 

 ductive of negative results. 



But as a matter of fact, where the queen- 

 rearer has determined to use only one queen 

 for the males, and one for producing his 

 queens to mate with those drones, then I 

 am assured he has alreatiy started on the 

 right road — toward isolation. That is his 

 first step, and thereafter he will know 

 just what drones his queens have mated 

 with, as I have already proved in my own 

 experience. Presuming the rearer is using 

 Italians he will produce drones quite differ- 

 ent from any in the neighborhood; and if 

 his selection has been made on the right 

 lines, any ordinary Italians or mongrel 

 drones that may exist near him will not be 

 so strong on the wing as his own, and 

 therefore he will have but a small proi)or- 

 tion of mismated queens, and certainly not 

 enough to account for the expense or incon- 

 venience of setting up an isolated or island 

 apiary. 



DEFINITE CONTROL AND SELECTION OF 

 DRONES. 



Jiut sui^pose I told you I had already a 

 method of actually controlling the act of 

 mating, do you think I would try to mate a 

 queen to just one selected drone, or one in 

 ten, or even one in twenty? Does the read- 

 er not imagine that the very drone the api- 

 arist would himself pick out might be less 

 fit, less hardy, less virile, than fifty otht rs? 

 No! I would allow the queen to have i he 

 choice fnmi at least fifty to one hundred 

 males in full fiight (from my selected drone 

 mother), when the chances are she would 

 mate with the best — the most liardy, strong- 

 winged, and fully virile male in fifty or one 

 hundred, as the case might be. 



I do not imjjly that, in ordinary circum- 

 stances, the breeder will leave for o]»en 

 flight the whole of the drones his best 

 queen may be able to produce at the ex- 

 pense of normal stores; but that he will 

 constantly be weeding out such as do not 

 appear to him to conform to the type he is 

 striving to maintain. 



