582 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



July 15 



warp, and, worse yet, it will twist. No doubt 

 he is right that the Js cover will warp less 

 than the J^. His top ventilation (pulling 

 back the cover to rest on cleat) would be too 

 much in Illinois. The flat cover is warm with 

 a cloth under it ; but wouldn't it be still 

 warmer with a dead-air space and a cloth ? 



And now the geographical center of the 

 honey-yield shifts to Arkansas, where L. E 

 Kerr lives. He tells in the Avier. Bee-Keeper 

 that, in his locality, all a wideawake bee- 

 keeper has to do in the seven months of slow, 

 steady flow, is to care for swarms in April and 

 May, keep good queens, and let the bees 

 alone, and he will average 100 to 300 lbs. of 

 fir^t-class comb honey. [I could and will tell 

 of some other geographical centers a little 

 liter.— Ed ] 



" If you would see the influence of a queen 

 on her bees, take the mildest colony that you 

 have, and also the most irritable, and ex- 

 change their queens, and note the effect 36 

 hours after the queens are liberated," sa3's D. 

 B. Norton in American Bee Keeper. I never 

 watched so closely as that ; but when I've 

 killed a queen because her bees were savage, I 

 have been puzzled to find a marked change 

 before there could be much change in the 

 bees. [Similar statements have been made 

 before, and I believe there is something in it ; 

 and yet — and yet — it seems hardly possible 

 that a queen could exert so great an influence 

 in so short a time. — Ed ] 



Scientific queen-rearing requires careful 

 selection of sire and dam, adapting one to the 

 other. Little can be done at that till fecunda- 

 tion can be controlled. In the mean time, 

 if every bee-keeper persistently breeds from 

 queens whose colonies store biggest crops, I'm 

 sure he will bring up his average. [Yes, that 

 is true. J F. Mclntyre, of California, has a 

 row of hives in his apiary, each of which has 

 a queen from his best breeder. He saj-s it 

 was easy to see that this row of hives gives a 

 larger yield than any other row of an equal 

 number and strength. By the by, in my trav- 

 els I have run across a number of bee-keepers 

 who have daughters from this Mclntyre queen, 

 and they all say they are something extra. 

 Their colonies surpass in honey the other col- 

 onies in the yard. If Mclntyre gets a free ad- 

 vertisement out of this he is welcome to it. — 

 Ed.] 



Longevity in bees is coming to the front. 

 Assuming that in harvest time a worker lives 

 six weeks, and goes afield when 16 days old, if 

 its life were prolonged a week it could store 

 27 per cent more. If one queen lives twice as 

 long as another, will not her workers live at 

 least a little longer? Is it not possible that, 

 by proper selection continuously exercised, we 

 might add that week to the life of the worker? 

 If we could add a sixth to its summer life, that 

 ought to add a sixth to its winter life. In 

 that case a bee born Oct. 1, which now lives 

 till Apr. 1, would live till May 1 — quite a help 

 in the wintering problem Another thing : 

 We can tell better what a queen is by two or 

 three seasons' work than we can by a single 

 season's work. The one that shows herself 



best for three seasons is a safe one to breed 

 from. I have queens born in 1897 that are 

 among the best — nne of them, I think, the 

 very best I have. [While this is true, the av- 

 erage queen, I think, had better be displaced 

 in two years by a young one. — Ed.] 



G. M. DooLiTTLE does some figuring in the 

 American Bee Journal, that seems to have no 

 flaws in it, by which he shows that a queen in 

 the hands of a queen-breeder may be worth 

 S3750 That seems an astounding value, but 

 it's hard to get away from it if we admit his 

 data : A queen whose bees store 10 lbs. more 

 than the common, one fourth of whose queen 

 progeny will equal the mother, which will 

 live three years, or long enough for the breed- 

 er to rear from her 4000 queens. The impor- 

 tant thing, connected to a certain extent with 

 this, that I'd like to ding into the ears of eve- 

 ry bee keeper, is that, if he will take the pains 

 to keep a record of the performance of his 

 bees, and then breed only from the queen 

 whose bees have done the best storing, Ve 

 would be materially adding to his income. 

 [Doolittle is not far wrong. See my answer 

 concerning the Mclntyre queen, in the preced- 

 ing column. — Ed ] 



^icKnwGS 



^JlOM.OmNElGHBORSnELDS.2^ 



Summer's blossoms everj'where. 

 Sweetest perfumes fill the air ; 

 Bees are busy all the day 

 Buzzing their melodious lay. 



\i/ 



Dr. Miller says in a private letter : " Unless 

 rain comes soon every thing will be dried up." 

 Quite the opposite in this region of country. 

 The amount of rain fallen between May 25 

 and July 5 has almost if not entirely broken 

 the record, while the heat has touched the 100 

 point. 



A Cleveland daily of July 4 speaks of what 

 it calls a very odd consignment of goods from 

 Italy — "a queen bee, a large bee designed as 

 the nucleus of an apiary." Is it possible that 

 such a thing should create surprise in a city 

 whose smoke can be seen from the Home of 

 the Honey-bees ? A constant stream of such 

 bees has been flowing from Italy to America 

 for years, and they have been sent even to 

 Australia and other remote countries. 



The indications are that bee culture is tak- 

 ing great strides now in Italy, in common 

 with many other lines of industry. The pa- 

 pers tell us that Italy has just passed France 

 in point of population, and will soon regain 

 much of its lost prestige among the great na- 

 tions. Conservatism among bee-keepers is 

 fast giving way to the search-light of actual 

 test. As Italy has done so much in the way 

 of giving to the world its best bees, we can 



