American ^ec Journal 



tlie bees' work is not interfered witli, 

 and by getting her in before the last 

 flow opportunity is given her to supply 

 an abunilant population of young bees 

 which will aid in the ripening and plac- 

 ing of the supplies for winter. Suc- 

 cessful wintering of the colony is 

 largely dependent upon the bees hatch- 

 ed late in the fall, and still more impor- 

 tant is the strength they give the colony 

 in the spring when breeding is active. 

 The rapid shrinking of the bee-popula- 

 tion in the spring known as " spring- 

 dwindling " IS due to an excess of old 

 bees and a scarcity of young ones. 



In the latitude of southern New 

 England, mid-August is the favored 

 time for requeening ; farther north it 

 is done earlier, and farther south later. 

 Sometimes after the queens are put in 

 no nectar is to be secured by the bees, 

 and hence the queens do little or no 

 laying, much to the bee-keeper's dis- 

 appointment and disadvantage. A 

 slight and constant supply of food will 

 cause the queen to lay freely, and the 

 desired population of young bees will 

 be secured. The simplest, most effec- 

 tive and most economical method for 

 this purpose is known as "Simmins' 

 soft-sugar plan." A " division-board " 

 feeder is tilled with the soft, cream- 

 colored sugar variously known as " A" 

 or " CofTee A " sugar, and is hung in 

 the brood-chamber ne.xt to the side of 

 the hive, one or two frames being re- 

 moved to make room. Water should 

 not be added to the sugar. The bees 

 will lick away steadily at this and use 

 it as food. It seems to be all consumed 

 by the bees and the brood, none of the 

 liquefied sugar being stored in the 

 combs. 



If the bee keeper has neglected to 

 requeen early in the fall, it should not 

 deter him from requeening at all. A 

 young queen put in so late that she will 

 scarcely begin to lay before the colony 

 clusters for cold weather, is far better 

 than an old one left there. 



Where a colony has a vigorous 

 queen, one that is keeping the popula- 

 tion large, it is the practise of some, in 

 sections where a fall crop is usually 

 secured, not to requeen such colony 

 until after the first killing frost. In 

 the hands of the skilled bee-keeper this 

 is often good policy, but may prove 

 disastrous with a beginner. 



An advantage of the annual requeen- 

 ing system which is not often spoken 

 of is the uniformity of colony condi- 

 tions produced. If the work was done 

 at the proper time, and at about the 

 same time, all the weak colonies were 

 either thrown in with the others or 

 built up with brood and bees from the 

 others, the following spring all the 

 colonies will be very nearly alike, and 

 if there is superiority in work of one 

 over the other it can be pretty safely 

 attributed to the queen, and she can 

 be used as a breeder for the season's 

 queens. 



Providence, R. I. 



Nendelism and Heredity Ap- 

 plied to Bees 



BY DR. A. F. BONNEY. 



There are two factors which will 

 have to be dealt with hereafter in rear- 



ing queen-bees, in addition to the puz- 

 zle of parthenogenesis and the problem 

 of mating and these are Mendelism 

 and Galton's Law of Ancestral Inheri- 

 tance. 



That some pleasing results have been 

 secured vvhil^ the experimenters have 

 been working in a strictly empirical 

 manner, it is not enough. Bee-keepers 

 are, or have been, satisfied with almost 

 anything. They have accepted queens 

 shipped by mail which could not pos- 

 sibly amount to anything unless to fur- 

 nish eggs for another generation of 

 queens, and such progeny must of 

 necessity be variable if not eternally 

 deficient. So far as I am concerned, I 

 shall never again try to rear queens or 

 good workers from queens sent in any 

 other way than in nucleus and by ex- 

 press. I think one queen secured in 

 this way early in the season will be 

 worth a score sent by mail. 



Any one wanting to post up cheaply 

 on Mendelism, can secure some fine 

 articles by getting from the Scientific 

 American supplements containing 

 them. These cost but 10 cents each, 

 and are splendid. Those who wish to 

 go deeper into the subject can get from 

 the same office '' Breeding and the Men- 

 delian Discovery," by \. D. Darbishire, 

 at an outlay of but %i. I have another 

 work which costs more, and books can 

 be got tor less (as low as $1), and any 

 of them will be a great help to the stu- 

 dent who, like the writer, wants to go 

 to the bottom of the matter. 



Briefly recited, Galton's law is that 

 an offspring inherits half of its nature 

 from the parents, a fourth from the 

 grand-parents, an eighth from the great- 

 grand-parents, and so on into the deci- 

 mals. It would seem from this that it 

 would be easy to have several gen- 

 erations of pure-bloods, and thus solve 

 the problem of breeding truly; but, 

 unfortunately — if we may question the 

 Creator's work — there is still another 

 factor to deal with — atavism — the ten- 

 dency to revert to some ancient ances- 

 tral type, a something which, skipping 

 father, will go back of even the grand- 

 father, and from some remote and 

 mean forefather or forbear choose an 

 undesirable trait and spoil our reckon- 

 ing ; and the writer suspects that //;/*■ 

 is much more apt to haf'peii -with insects 

 than the higher forms of life. 



To make much progress in the study 

 of eugenics, biology and heredity, one 

 must be working independent of an in- 

 come, and most of our great experi- 

 menters are, large sums having been 

 set aside for their use, and I regret to 

 find that bee-keepers can not hope to 

 do much. In the first place, our time 

 is limited to two or three months in 

 the summer, and if we fail to get what 

 we want we are obliged to wait an- 

 other year, which makes the rearing, 

 intelligently, of queens, in the north 

 half of the United States, at any rate, 

 about as slow as the rearing of blooded 

 cattle. If this looks unreasonable stop 

 and consider how difficult it is to rear 

 a queen and get her to give you brood 

 (to say nothing of another queen) the 

 same season. Last season I had hardly 

 a drone in my yard on account of a lack 

 of rain. 



I can imagine the protests which will 

 arise to this, and the advice I shall re- 

 ceive, but I am not alone, and in time 



may be able to make myself better un- 

 derstood. What I now want is to get 

 bee-keepers to approach .Tiore intelli- 

 gently this matter of breeding bees 

 (queens), for surely a worker which 

 lives but a month can not count. 



What 1 hope to be able to do — as 

 there are few bees near me, and some 

 of them pretty pure Italians — is to de- 

 velop a strain of bees which I can rear 

 a queen from and say : " .At least two- 

 thirds of the queens reared from this 

 bee will do so-and-so as to honey-gath- 

 ering," for that is what we want, and if 

 a colony will, in a normal season, store 

 100 pounds of honey, I for one do not 

 care if they swarm every day. It is 

 honey we want, not five yellow streaks, 

 not long tongues (on paper), not bees 

 so gentle that the babies can use them 

 for playthings^y'rt.s-/ honey.' 



I want to close this rambling article 

 by asking a few questions. Of what 

 use is a .5-banded bee ? Will one or 

 two more yellow bands increase the 

 tendency to store sweets ? I wonder. 



What bee-keeper in the Un ted States, 

 or the world, has as yet developed a 

 strain of bees which will breed true to 

 type I Remember that we have strains 

 and breeds of pigs, chickens, horses, 

 ducks — almost everything in the way 

 of domestic animals that we can depend 

 upon to give progeny in no way in- 

 ferior to the parents. The breed or 

 strain is developed. Dr. Phillips writes 

 me that the Italian queens we get from 

 Italy are variable, and have to be bred 

 in this country for improvement! 



Can we ever expect to get the best 

 results by using queens that have been 

 sent by mail, sometimes across the 

 ocean and continent ? Mr. Ed Miles, 

 of the Miles Honey Co., writes me: 



" Let me whisper in your ear, if you ever 

 lind a queen that has gone through the mails 

 that will produce a colony of bees superior 

 to our best 'mixed bees.' you will have 

 found somethinir I never have, and I've pur- 

 chased quite a few queens through the 

 mail." 



I'd like to quote his whole letter, as 

 he is intensely practical — and we are 

 " scrapping" all the time. 



Finally, while Mendel discovered 

 some wonderful things about plants 

 and flowers, it was left for later stu- 

 dents to show equally startling results 

 with mice and the higher vertebrs, 

 and it is now practically demonstrated 

 that his laws will apply to the human 

 race as well. Several years of eugenics 

 and Mendelism makes it seem almost 

 certain that in the latter we have a so- 

 lution of the fundamental problem of 

 heredity, and I want to apply it to the 

 bees. 



Buck Grove, Iowa. 



" The Amateur Bee-Keeper " 



This is a booklet of 86 pages, written 

 by Mr. J. W. Rouse, of Missouri. It is 

 mainly for beginners— amateur bee- 

 keepers—as its name indicates. It is a 

 valuable little work, revised this year, 

 and contains the methods of a practical, 

 up-to-date bee-keeper of many years' 

 experience. It is fully illustrated. Price, 

 postpaid, 25 cents ; or with the Ameri- 

 can Bee Journal one year— both for 

 $1.10. Send all orders to the office of 

 the American Bee JournaL 



