1879 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



339 



good as Italians. Should we attempt to rear 

 queens from them, however, we should had 

 the old black blood cropping out every now 

 and then. It is on this account, principally, 

 that I have advised using an imported 

 queen, and no other, for Italianizing an api- 

 ary. I have seen queens carry the append- 

 age you mention several days, but it always 

 disappears by the time they commence to 

 lay. I always like to hear about cutting 

 bee trees, but I like better to be one of the 

 crowd. 



JUST WHAT I DIDINTHE CHASE FOR 

 THAT HONEY. 



BEFORE I had finished writing the article about 

 improving- the red clover, I began to keep my 

 promise to do some practical work in the 

 matter. For years, I have always had some plant or 

 plants in hand, trying to teach them the way in 

 which they should grow, and work of that sort is 

 especially fascinating to me. I would tell about 

 some of these efforts, only 'twould make this article 

 so abominably long. Well, I went for the clover 

 fields, inspected, dissected, reflected, rejected, se- 

 lected,— now for a few hours, then for a few hours, 

 and then again by and by, until nine elected clovers 

 stood all prim in a row in the garden. Did they live? 

 Avaunt! Foolish question. They bloomed on, and 

 grew, and ripened seed, as if nothing worse than 

 Thanksgiving Day had transpired. Secret; a big 

 hunk of solid earth, and plenty of water. Clover 

 No. 10 was afterward discovered and accepted, but 

 not transplanted, as it had plenty of ripe seed on it 

 already. 



All the ten have distinct qualities. No. 1 has a 

 large, beautiful head, No. 10 a little bit of a head, 

 No. 5 a head that keeps blooming for a week or two, 

 beginning at the base and going slowly to the sum- 

 mit. A believer in wedlock is clover No. 2, as its 

 blooms grow side by side in pairs; it has also a 

 curious eccentricity which it would take too many 

 words to describe. Nos. 6 and 7 are pale red and 

 deep red clovers, chosen for being as ordinary as 

 possible in all respects except the shortness of the 

 tubes. No. 8, like Saul, stood head and shoulders 

 above his fellows. No. 9 is the pet, the shortest 

 tubed of all, and clothed in peculiar and delicately 

 tinted apparel. 



On "Freedom's Day" I had four kinds of seed ripe 

 enough to plant, and all the others by July 10th. 

 Starting little fine seeds in midsummer is "kittle 

 wark." Did I drill them an inch deep, and then 

 leave them to the tender mercies of drouth and 

 blazing sun? Not so. A nine foot row of little- 

 stakes the size of a pencil, and seven inches apart, 

 deployed at right angles from each clover. The 

 ground was thoroughly soaked. Each seed lay in 

 just such a position by its stake. A five inch board 

 mounted on bricks gave shade at noon, and let the 

 sun under morning and night. In six das-s, the sec- 

 ond generation of improved clover was making a 

 cheerful show of itself. To-day, Aug. <i, some of the 

 plants have put out as many as ten or eleven leaves. 

 I hope to make some of them bloom this fall, (lover 

 manifestly has the trick (so common among weeds, 

 as their defense against extermination) of suspend- 

 ing germination, and coming up at some future 

 time. Most of the ten sorts are coming up yet, and 

 how much longer they will continue I don't know. 

 No. 4 is an exception, nearly every identical seed 



reporting itself inside of a week; while of No. 2 

 scarcely one seed out of fifty sprouts as yet. The 

 rows, however, are most of them filling up, and 

 some will soon have to be thinned out. Almost in- 

 clined to be lifted up am I, to have things go so well. 

 And the clovers themselves, in their little bed, they 

 are lifted up. That villainous mole, he does it. I 

 have no more affection for that mole than I have 

 for a bed-bug. A very careful analysis of each 

 clover is booked for preservation, to compare with 

 the new crop and furnish data to show how fast the 

 work gets on. I shall not be discouraged, if the first 

 progress is almost all in the wrong direction. 



I have discovered that bees have two, quite differ- 

 ent ways of working on red clover. They are work- 

 ing freely now on the second crop. Quietly taking 

 a very close look at a bee, he can be seen to push his 

 head deep into the tube, and remain there quite a 

 long time. While so engaged he keeps violently 

 scratching and digging his toe nails in, as if in the 

 effort to get down deep. Late blooms are shorter 

 tubed than early ones, and he is evidently licking the 

 interior of the tube well down toward the bottom, if 

 not actually touching the bottom drop of nectar. 

 While I was selecting my clovers some bees were at 

 work on early blooms. They proceeded in a man- 

 ner entirely different, passing from one tube to 

 another so rapidly that it was impossible to see what 

 they did, any farther than to see that they did not 

 make any attempt to get down into the heart of the 

 flower. Possibly they only passed their brushes 

 over the stamens for pollen; but I suspect that 

 some of the upper folds of the corolla, in very favor- 

 able weather, secrete a little honey,— enough so that 

 a very agile and industrious bee can make it pay to 

 lap it up. I think some confusion and many false 

 claims have resulted from not discerning these two, 

 different ways of working. If Italian bees visit red 

 clover while common bees do not, it is no proof that 

 either the one or the other can reach down 43 hun- 

 dredths of an inch. 



I had some fears of failure in measuring precisely 

 how deep bees can take honey, and tried first with a 

 bunch of fine straws. The result was not entirely 

 satisfactory, owing to the difficulty of making the 

 remaining syrup keep its place in the straw, while it 

 could be laid bare and measurement made. The 

 general indication from several trials was that 24 

 hundredths of an inch was about the distance. Up- 

 on getting some clover tubes filled, I gave the first 

 head to the same colony. Result did not vary much, 

 although some tubes were taken out deeper than 24. 

 The colony were blacks, with many hybrids mixed 

 among them. A colony of blacks having no foreign- 

 ers visible among theni did much better, taking out 

 several tubes 30 hundredths, and one 32. The Ital- 

 ians crushed the most of their tubes, only two being 

 left in condition to measure. In these, they had 

 lowered the syrup 26 hundredths. The feat of draw- 

 syrup 32 hundredths deep was also performed di- 

 rectly under my eye by a two-banded hybrid, as I 

 held the clover in my hand. The tube was so nearly 

 transparent that I could see the tongue operating 

 part of the time. 



The dried top of a June-grass is the proper straw 

 to fill a clover tube with. Fill the straw by suction, 

 and insert it in the tube, and mind what you're at, 

 too, for the flower resists with all its little might 

 having anything thrust down its throat, and you 

 mil tear it or crinkle it down, if not very careful. 

 Insert to the bottom, and blow forcibly in the straw 

 while slowly withdrawing it. 



The results above given are better than I expect- 

 ed. The average tube length of early blooms is 

 now 42. From this we need to improve off but 18, 

 and our revised clover will be good enough. 



Bodley, Ohio. E. E. Hasty. 



