40. 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



May 1 



The second class contains three errors not 

 yet corrected. Instead of 53 varieties of gold- 

 enrod, it should be species. In the article on 

 honey-dew, the distinction is not as sharply 

 made as it should be between aphid (or plant- 

 louse) honey-dew, which is, perhaps, never 

 very bad, and coccid (or scale-louse) honey- 

 dew, which is never good. In the list of hon- 

 ey-plants. Prof. Cook says "Burr marigold" 

 should be " Burr marigold " ! It is quite pos- 

 sible the printer in Chicago is responsible for 

 this, the intention being to show that only 

 one r should be in the first syllable. Even 

 then it needs further correction, for in the 

 dictionary it is bur-mangold. 



A third class contains nine items which not 

 all would agree with Prof. Cook in calling er- 

 rors. 



In the chapter on Italian bees occurs a pic- 

 ture of the abdomen of a worker, which is 

 said to be "detached from the shoulders." 

 Prof. Cook says, " This use of the '<f/or6. shoul- 

 ders is not warranted by any good usage that 

 I know of ; and as thorax is a perfectly good 

 word, I see no need of coining a new one." 

 The word thorax is undoubtedly the better 

 word for those who understand what thorax 

 means ; but all are not so familiar with the 

 word as an entomologist like Prof. Cook, and 

 it is a question whether a larger number of 

 readers might not catch the correct meaning 

 better with the word shoulders than with tho- 

 rax. However, in the latest edition the ob- 

 jectionable word does not appear, the reading 

 being, ' ' the body of the bee detached from 

 the abdomen," which might be marked for 

 further change, so as to read, " the abdomen 

 of the bee detached from the thorax." 



Prof. Cook has grave doubts as to honey 

 from any plant being poisonous. It is possi- 

 ble that there is no such thing as poisonous 

 honey, but there certainly has been some 

 strong testimony in that direction. At any 

 rate, as said in the latest edition, " In a mat- 

 ter involving severe sickness or possible loss 

 of life it would seem to be policy to err on 

 the safe side," so there can be no very great 

 harm in telling about the reputation some 

 plants have as to furnishing poisonous honey. 



Prof. Cook says : " Is it wise to say that ten- 

 day queens may be just as good as any?" 

 Analysis by able scientists show that, for the 

 first three days, a worker larva is fed the same 

 as a queen, so it may be that a larva not more 

 than three days old is as good as any from 

 which to rear a queen. Mr. Cowan and others 

 say a queen emerges 15 days after the laying 

 of the egg. So a ten-day queen would be 

 started from a larva two days old — surely as 

 safe as one three days old. Without intend- 

 ing to make it so, Prof. Cook has used such 

 wording that it might be understood that the 

 book favors these ten-day queens. On the 

 contrary the book says immediately ; " but to 

 be on the safe side, I should prefer giving 

 them larvae one or two days younger." In 

 the latest edition the reading is, " These ten- 

 day queens probably are not as good as those 

 reared from younger larvse." 



In this same connection Prof. Cook says : 

 ' ' When things are normal they start the queen 



from the egg. I think the wise breeder will 

 always do the same." He would hardly have 

 said that if he had taken the pains to inquire 

 as to the practice of Doolittle and the majori- 

 ty of our best breeders who start queens from 

 larvse, and not from eggs. 



Prof. Cook thinks that, when a young queen 

 begins to lay after eggs and larvae are given, 

 the laying is more likely a coincidence than a 

 result, and says a good many experiments 

 should be tried before reaching a conclusion. 

 Certainly many experiments have been tried, 

 for many have made it a practice thus to give 

 young brood ; but it is a difficult thing to say 

 in any given case whether the queen might 

 not have begun laying just the same if no 

 brood had been given. But the fact that so 

 many have tried it, and that few or no cases 

 of failure have occurred, makes the probabil- 

 ity lie strongly on the side of the belief of re- 

 sult rather than coincidence. 



" That the thread which evinces that mating 

 has taken place is absorbed into the body of 

 the queen, I think very improbable indeed," 

 says our reviewer. The ABC says in sub- 

 stance that, when the queen returns from her 

 wedding-flight, the bees sometimes pull at 

 the protruding substance, but it is probably 

 eventually absorbed into the body of the 

 queen ; and the day after, all trace of it will 

 be a shriveled thread. That is not saying the 

 thread is absorbed. It may be, however, that, 

 aside from the filling of the spermatheca,^ 

 there is no absorption in the case. 



Prof. Cook says, " I am not at all sure that 

 bees do not communicate. . . . That they 

 are one-idead insects seem also to me not 

 proven." That last sentence evidently refers 

 to these words of the ABC: "I am quite 

 sure they are unable to communicate to each 

 other more than a single idea." Whether 

 more than one idea at a time can be conveyed 

 may be a subject for difference of opinion ; 

 but the very saying that bees are unable to 

 communicate more than a single idea is prac- 

 tically saying that they do communicate — a 

 belief which is also to be seen on other por- 

 tions of the page, making it difficult to see 

 how Prof. Cook should be so inconsistent as 

 to arraign the ABC for teaching that bees do 

 not communicate. 



" Here, again, Mr. Root advises the use of 

 the lantern," says Prof. Cook. " I have tried 

 the night-working with bees several times 

 when necessity compelled it, and I should be 

 slow to recommend it, especially to a novice." 

 Prof. Cook is a stickler for telling the truth, 

 and on this page the author simply tells the 

 plain truth as to his own experience, without 

 directly advising any one to imitate his exam- 

 ple. If Prof. Cook failed, that does not prove 

 that the author failed, neither does it prove 

 that any one else would fail who should ex- 

 actly imitate the author. 



Prof. Cook is right in saying that formic 

 acid is not a vegetable acid, the ABC being 

 faulty in calling a vegetable secretion that 

 which is secreted from rather than by vegeta- 

 ble growth. But both reviewer and reviewed 

 probably need overhauling for talking about 

 formic acid as the poison, when latest investi- 



