^74 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Dec. 15 



Now, brother bee-keepers of the queen- 

 Tearing persuasion, do not conclude that I 

 wish to compare you with the fellow who 

 induces simple credulous people suffering- 

 irom some imaginary affliction to send their 

 liard-earned cash for his nostrums in the 

 hope of being benefited. The advertiser 

 has, of course, a right to say what he likes 

 in the space which he pays for, provided he 

 uses no bad language; but when we say we 

 have been or pretend to be able to furnish 

 queens whose workers will gather the nec- 

 tar from red clover, are we not, in ninety- 

 nine cases out of a hundred, claiming what 

 is not true? Are we not going too fast in 

 pretending to have now that which we may 

 hope to develop in a decade or perhaps a 

 century? Great improvement in the animal 

 and vegetable kingdoms has not been ac- 

 complished in a day or a year. 



Many patient, energetic, studious, and 

 intelligent minds have worked on these 

 problems for decades, even centuries. Many 

 men have devoted almost their lifetime to 

 the improvement of a single species, or cer- 

 tain varieties of various fruits, flowers, an- 

 imals, and fowls. Note. Mr. Burbank, of 

 California, has devoted a great portion of 

 his life to the improvement of plums, pota- 

 toes, etc., and has also, I believe, by hy- 

 bridization, produced some new and rare 

 gladioli. Considering the above, how can 

 we claim to have the desired long-tongued 

 bee? Such a bee is something not to be 

 found every day in every queen-rearer's 

 apiary. Among many hundreds of queens 

 that I have had under my observation in the 

 past 16 years, I had one real red-clover 

 queen. 



One of the chief if not the first essential 

 to the development of the red-clover bees of 

 the future is the controlling of the mating of 

 queens. With this accomplished we shall 

 be in a fair way toward accomplishing our 

 object. In the absence of this the best we 

 can do is to prevent the flight of undesira- 

 ble drones. The red-clover bee of the fu- 

 ture will not come up to our standard sim- 

 ply by having a long tongue. The ideal 

 long-tongued bee, in addition to possessing 

 the long tongue, must be industrious, vigor- 

 ous, hardy, as gentle as possible without 

 detracting from auj' of the first four essen- 

 tials; and in order to please some of us it 

 must have j'ellow bands around it or be 

 yellow all over. The queens must be pro- 

 lific, and possess all other desirable traits. 



Now, Mr. Queen-rearer (I almost said 

 queen-breeder, but you are not a queen- 

 breeder — you rear the queens, and they 

 breed according to their own sweet will), 

 have I set before you a hard task? If so, do 

 not be discouraged, but go forth and set to 

 work; and after you have done all you can, 

 and your son has taken up the work where 

 you left off on account of old age, and has 

 devoted a score of j^ears to the development 

 of the ideal long-tongued bee, he may come 

 back and report that he has lengthened the 

 bee's tongue by a third, and has not let any 

 of the other essentials retrograde, but, on 



the contrary, has improved them; but don't 

 you come back to-morrow or next week or 

 next year, and say, "I've got that queen 

 now," or I will tell you j'ou're another. 



Remember, now, ninety per cent of that 

 queen's daughters (no, I will drop to fifty 

 per cent) must be as good as she is; but if 

 only ten per cent come up to the standard I 

 can not take her, and your son will have 1) 

 go back and teach his son to take up the 

 work, and labor to reach the goal. 



I should like to tell all about that red- 

 clover queen; but as this article is already 

 longer than I had intended I will simply 

 state that her workers gathered nectar from 

 red clover, and stored it in quantities in 1- 

 Ib. sections, while all other bees in the yard 

 gathered practically nothing. 



Bluft'ton, Mo. 



[I have been thinking myself that some- 

 thing more ought to be said along the lines 

 presented by Mr. Miller. There was a 

 time when there was a great craze for j'el- 

 low bands. It grew to such intensity that 

 many breeders were looking only for color, 

 forgetting every thing else. While this was 

 true, there were a few who looked for excel- 

 lence as well as beauty. But the tempta- 

 tion in most cases was to breed out dark 

 and breed in the yellow, at a sacrifice of 

 many very desirable qualities. It was J. 

 M. Rankin or Dr. Miller, I believe, who 

 started the discussion about long tongues. 

 It will be remembered that I discouraged 

 the latter, and even ridiculed the idea; not- 

 withstanding, he insisted that the Europe- 

 ans had found that there was considerable 

 variation in the length of tongues, and that 

 we in America ought to give the matter 

 some thought. 



Two seasons ago, when red clover was at 

 its height, I determined to look into the 

 matter. The bees were working on a field 

 of red clover near our out-yard. I noticed 

 how the Italians (there were no blacks) 

 probed down into the shorter flower-tubes 

 of the clover-heads near the edges; how 

 they >vould reach down into the longer 

 tubes, and apparently reach in vain. I 

 watched the bees come and go on one head 

 for some little time. After thej^ had se- 

 cured all the nectar it was possible for 

 them to get out of the little tubes, I pulled 

 the head; then, taking the end of each tube 

 in turn, I squeezed it up till I could force 

 the drop of nectar out. In the long tubes I 

 observed that the bees could not get more 

 than a tenth, or merely a taste of the nec- 

 tar. The shorter ones they sucked dry. 

 I then began to see that, if those same bees 

 had longer tongues, or tongues long enough 

 to reach into the longest tubes, we should 

 be able to get tons and tons of good honey 

 that now literally goes to waste. It was 

 during this season we had one colony from 

 an imported queen that far outstripped ev- 

 ery thing else in the apiary on red clover ; 

 and, as I have before stated, this colony 

 would gather honey and store it when other 

 bees would be trjang to rob, or would starve 



