134 



American Vae Journal 



bees themselves or encourage bee-cul- 

 ture in their immediate vicinity. 



Bee-keepers of America, sustain your 

 National Association! A new depart- 

 ure has been made. Give it a fair trial. 

 No good ever came from secession or 

 strife. You have it in your power to 

 make a success, and success you will 

 achieve sooner or later. Let it be 

 sooner! Put a shoulder to the wheel. 

 The little drops of honey make the car- 

 loads. 



Bees often need feeding until the 

 fields and pastures are white with 

 bloom. If you feed in spring, let the 

 feed be fairly warm and somewhat 

 thinner than ordinary honey. The bees 

 need water when feeding the brood, 

 and thin feed will partly supply this 

 need. Sugar syrup is better for this 

 purpose than honey, because it attracts 

 robber-bees much less than does sweet- 

 smelling honey. 



Do not feed unknoivn honey to your 

 bees. This should be inscribed in large 

 capitals on the walls of every honey- 

 house. Tainted honey is the main vehi- 

 cle of foul brood. It will do no harm 

 to human beings, and it is impossible 

 to detect the tainted from the untainted. 



Do not fear foul brood. The writer 

 kept bees for 40 years before he saw a 

 sample of it. But if you meet foul 

 brood destroy it as you would a rattle- 

 snake. It is only upon that condition 

 that you need not fear it. The careless 

 bee-keeper's apiary will sooner or later 

 be destroyed by it, if it happens to 

 come to his neighborhood. 



should not be capable of considerable modi- 

 fication throuKli experimental breeding. I 

 believe, however, that mnch headway can 

 not be made until it is possible accurately 

 to control the matins of the queens and 

 drones." ...,,, , 



Prof. Wilmon Newell says: I fully be- 

 lieve that it is possible to get strains which 

 will gather more honey than those we now 

 have, and it seems within the realm of pos- 

 sibility that a nonswarming bee might make 

 its appearanceas a mutation." 



Prof. W. K. Castle says; "I am a strong 

 believer in the efficacy of selection to mod- 

 ify animals of all sorts." 



With all this by way of encourage- 

 ment, there still stands in the way the 

 great diificiilty that under ordinary cir- 

 cumstances the mating of the queen 

 and drone can not be controlled. But 

 Dr. Bonney himself thinks that may be 

 overcome, for he says: "In the Da- 

 kotas, where I lately spent some time, 

 there are millions of acres which never 

 saw a bee, treeless, tlowerless plains, 

 where mating can be controlled per- 

 fectly, I think," and he thinks a mating 

 station in one of the Dakotas might 

 solve the problem. 



Can Honey-Bees Be Improved? 



Dr. A. F. Bonney has shown himself 

 a man of open mind. With the desire 

 to have the opinion of scientific men 

 as to the question whether the bee 

 could be improved by breeding, he ad- 

 dressed a letter to several of them, at 

 the same time candidly expressing his 

 own belief in these words: 



" I have always been of the opinion that 

 tlie bee is the most highly specialized animal 

 alive, and that all progress, change, or im- 

 provement ceased ages ago." 



The answers he received were not 

 such as to endorse strongly his opinion. 



In such a case the average man would 

 likely have dropped the matter; at 

 least he would not have taken pains to 

 give much publicity to the answers re- 

 ceived. But it seems Dr. Bonney is 

 not an average man. Instead of pigeon- 

 holing the answers received, he has 

 published them in the Hee-Keepers' Re- 

 view, and frankly says: 



"Personally 1 have somewliat changed my 

 mind aliout Ihe possibility of improving tht- 

 hce or, ratlur. of bettering a yard filled with 

 bei-s though at present I incline to the idea 

 that it must be done by culling out the- uii- 

 di-sirable colonies, and in conneclion with 

 this work rearing avast number of dronus 

 from excellent mothers, svhile we do not 

 know bill what tin- worst drone in the bunch 

 will mate with our new iniei-n." 



It may be well to quote some of the 

 most encouraging words contained in 

 the replies. It is not likely that so 

 many will rush into the business of im- 

 proving bees as to need any discourag- 

 ing words. 



Prof W. M. Wheeler says: " My little ex- 

 jerience with the hoiiry 1il-l- leads me to be- 

 ieve that Iheru is no inherent reason why it 



Pi 



Spraying Solution Hepellent to 

 Insects 



Benjamin W. Douglass says in Glean- 

 ings in Bee Culture : 



During the last two seasons a new spray 

 material has come into very general use over 

 the country. This is the dilute lime and sul- 

 phur solution as a substitute for the old Bor- 

 deaux mixture. The Bordeaux was simply 

 a mixture of copper sulphate and lime, and 

 it was used in connection with the arsenate 

 of lead or with Paris green. The new 

 sulphur spray requires the addition of the 

 arsenic, just as the Bordeaux did; but it pos- 

 sesses the added advantage to the bee- 

 keeper that it is repellent to all insects. 

 The smell of the sulphur is so strong that 

 trees sprayed with it are notably free from 

 insects of all sorts during the period through 

 which the smell lasts. In this way the bees 

 are repelled along with certain injurious in- 

 sects notably the plum curculiot. This re- 

 pellent action of the lime and sulphur will 

 no doubt go a long way toward easing the 

 fear of the bee-keeper. For my own part I 

 feel so sure of the repellent value of the 

 sulphur that 1 will venture the assertion 

 that no harm would result to the bees, even 

 if the orchard should be sprayed while in 

 blossom. Of course, it would be highly un- 

 desirable to spray the trees when they are 

 in full bloom; but I simply make the state- 

 ment to show my confidence in the reiiellent 

 value of the solution. 



That sounds hopeful, but one hesi- 

 tates to be too hopeful in the matter 

 until it be more fully established just 

 how "general" is the use of this new 

 spraying solution, and also asto whether 

 it shall, in all cases, be sufficiently re- 

 pellent to keep bees away from a fruit- 

 tree in full bloom. However, a hope- 

 ful view costs nothing, unless it should 

 have the effect of causing a let-up in 

 the effort to secure proper legislation 

 on the subject. 



Gettini; Right Lf.(;isi,.\tion on Straying 



And to secure the right kind of legis- 

 lation seems to be a matter exceedingly 

 difhcult of accomplishment, at least in 

 some States. One trouble is that fruit- 

 growers too often stand squarely in 

 the way, and there are morefruit-grow- 

 ers than bee-keepers. A bill to protect 

 bee-keepers against loss from spraying 

 during fruit-bloom is likely to be re- 

 ferred to a committee whose chairman 

 is interested in the raising of fruits, 

 and the bill dies in that committee. At 

 least as our laws are generally at 

 present. 



One would think that with a chair- 



man of sufficient intelligence there 

 should be no trouble. Neither should 

 there be if men were as unselfish as in- 

 telligent. In one legislature a bill 

 against spraying during fruit-bloom 

 was introduced. The chairman of the 

 committee to which it was referred was 

 a man having thousands of fruit-trees, 

 and he promptly decided there should 

 be " nothing doing " with that bill. 

 When asked why not, his reply was 

 that every fruit-grower knew that it 

 was harmful to the crop to spray dur- 

 ing bloom, hence there was no need of 

 any law. A little probing, however, 

 will show that there is something 

 further in the background. The fruit- 

 grower knows that to spray when his 

 trees are full in bloom results in loss 

 to himself. But there are among them 

 men who reason somewhat after this 

 fashion : 



"I have a great many trees to spray, 

 and unless I begin in good season I 

 shall be too late about spraying some 

 of them. To make sure of getting 

 through in time, I must begin before 

 all the blossoms have fallen. Even if 

 some harm is done to the latest blos- 

 soms, the loss accruing in that way 

 will be more than counterbalanced by 

 the good done to the earlier fruit. Too 

 much fruit will set anyway, and the loss 

 of those latest blooms will be really a 

 gain." 



Whether his reasoning be good or 

 not, it is easily seen that he takes no 

 account whatever of the loss to the 

 bees, which are killed just as much by 

 poison on the latest as on the earliest 

 blossoms. He practically says : "The 

 bees have done their work in fertiliz- 

 ing the earlier blossoms, and it is noth- 

 ing to me if they are killed on the late 

 bloom. I don't want the trouble of 

 looking out for the interests of the 

 bee-keeper, and so I don't want any 

 law on the subject." 



So it seems likely that it will not be 

 a good thing for bee-keepers to let up 

 on their efforts for legislation until a 

 proper law is obtained, unless it turns 

 out that a spray comes into vogue that 

 shall repel the bee, and which spray it 

 shall be to the interest of the t'rnit- 

 irroiver to use. 



Finding a Queen 



When a queen can not be found with 

 the usual looking over the combs the 

 first time, it is generally well to look 

 over the combs the second time. If 

 she is not found after carefully looking 

 the second time, it is well to close the 

 hive and not look again until at least 

 half an hour has passed. To be sure, 

 you may find her upon looking over 

 the combs the third or fourth time, and 

 again you may not find her if you keep 

 looking for an hour. She is likely hid 

 somewhere where you will not find her, 

 and so long as you keep up the excite- 

 ment she will not put in an appearance; 

 while if you wait till a little later, or 

 until the next day, you may find her in 

 less than i! minutes after opening the 

 hive. It seems a mystery where she 

 can be bid so safely and for so long, 

 but experience teaches that it is econ- 

 omy of time to postpone the search. 

 Sometimes, however, there may be 

 some special reason why the delay of 

 half an hour is very objectionable, and 



