DEVOTED TO BEEH A-IND HONEY, A1VI> HOME INTERESTS. 



Vol. VII. 



SEPTEMBER 1, 1879. 



No. 9. 



A. I. ROOT, 



Publisher and Proprietor 

 Medina, O. 



•} 



Published Monthly. 

 Established, in 1873 



TERMS: «1.00 Per Annum in Ad- 

 vance; 3 Copies for $2.50; 5 for 93.75; 



' ~ oi more, 60c. each. Single Number, 10c. 



(TI 

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,llO 



SCRAPS AND SKETCHES. NO. 9. 



EIGHT QUEENS WITfl ONE SWARM ! 



3 STOPPED the other day at neighbor Wilson's, 

 and had a chat with him. As he keeps bees, of 

 — ' course we "talked bees." 



Says friend W., "Will," how many queens did you 

 ever see with a swarm of bees?" 



"I never allow my bees to swarm, consequently I 

 have never had any experience in seeing - several 

 queens with one swarm; but I have read of an in- 

 stance in which half a dozen queens were seen with 

 an after swarm." 



"Well," says he, "I am a little ahead of that. 

 Last July, I shook a second swarm in front of a hive, 

 and as they were going in, I saw a queen go in; I 

 thought, 'There, the queen is in all right, any way.' 

 A minute or two afterwards, as I was looking at the 

 entrance, I saw a queen enter, and wondered if the 

 queen had left the hive and was now going in again. 

 Pretty soon, I again saw a queen entering, and then, 

 as the thought struck me that there might be more 

 than one queen, I began to watch in earnest; and, 

 if you will believe it, there were eight queens, in all, 

 that I saw enter the hive." 



"Is it possible?" 



"Yes; it is not only possible, but it is a fact. Now, 

 sometime, when you are writing an article for 

 Gleanings, don't you think you could 'write this 

 up?' " 



"Oh yes, certainly," said I, "and now tell me an- 

 other." 



"Tell you another? Well, did you ever have any 

 trouble with 



BEES DESERTING TnElK HIVE IN JULY?" 



"No; I never did." 



"Well, I had a first swarm that had nearly filled its 

 hive with honey and brood, when, one day, they 

 came out and left for parts unknown, without stop- 

 ping to cluster, or even so much as to say good-bye. 

 There was scarcely a bee left in the hive. Some of 

 the brcod was nearly ready to hatch, while there 

 was a large quantity of unsealed brood, which soon 

 began to crawl out of the cells. Tn order to save it, 

 I was obliged to furnish nurses by taking bees from 

 other hives." 



"Is that so? Bees do indeed have strange freaks 

 sometimes, don't they? Well, I must go on over to 

 Mr. Kroll's. Come and see me when you can. 

 Good day." 



BEES ON A RAMPAGE. 



I had a good "bee chat" at friend Kroll's, and, just 



before I came away, Mrs. K. related an experience 

 with their bees, which very nearly equals the "ram- 

 page" described in the extract that you give on page 

 20 of the present volume. One very good thing 

 about it is, she knew what caused the trouble. It 

 was not "snakes." I wish I could describe it in Mrs. 

 K's graphic manner, but I will not attempt it, as I 

 should probably make a "botch" of it. The best I 

 can do is to tell it in my own very common place 

 language. 



I do not remember the month when it occurred, 

 but it was sometime in autumn, when some boys, 

 who had been playing in the granary, went off and 

 left the door open. It did not take the bees long to 

 find some jars of extracted basswood honey standing 

 in the granary, neither did it take them long to bite 

 holes in the paper that was fastened over the tops 

 of the jars. The honey had been allowed to come in 

 contact with the paper, or perhaps there might have 

 been no trouble. Mrs. K. thinks, when she first 

 discovered the pilfering, pillaging throng, there 

 must have been, at least, a good swarm of them in 

 the building. She closed the door, and in a few 

 minutes the whole front of the building was black 

 with bees. They soon found that they could get no 

 more honey, and then "squads" of them began to 

 come into the house and sting the children, and 

 raise a "rumpus" generally. At about this stage of 

 the proceedings, Mrs. K. drove them out of the 

 house with smoke, and then built a big "smudge" 

 outside, near the door. But the bees were not to be 

 balked in this manner. Their "dander" was up, and 

 they were going to fig"ht something. If they couldn't 

 fight folks, they would fight among themselves; and 

 so they "pitched in," and before they really felt sat- 

 isfied they had "cleaned out" some half a dozen col- 

 onies "slick and clean." I think Mr. K. made one 

 wrong- move, and that was, when a colony was at- 

 tacked, he would carry it to a new location. I 

 should think that such a course would not only de- 

 prive the removed stock of its army of flying bees, 

 which would be its best defenders, but it would mix 

 up and demoralize the bees, and make "confusion 

 worse confounded." W. Z. Hutchinson. 



Kogersville, Mich. 



\<. i; OF BEES. 



MOTHING in the bee business has given us more 

 pleasure than experimenting to ascertain 

 the different ages of bees, and the different 

 offices they perform at certain ages, when in a 

 normal condition. When these conditions are not 



