JANTAKY 15, 1915 



55 



Conversations with Doolittle 



At Borodino, New York. 



|fc-_ VUESTIOXS ON QUEEN-REARING. 



■|*\ A correspondent wishes lue to 

 ^■r] answer these questions: 

 ^^Bl " 1±' on the second day after a 

 ^^^1 colony has been made queenless we 

 ^^jB take away all the brood and give 

 the bees a frame containing only 

 eggs from our best queen-breeder, why 

 is it that quite a share of those eggs will 

 disappear instead of all hatching into 

 larva?, as would have been the ease had 

 there been brood in all stages left? " 



This is a question I have often tried to 

 solve, but have never done so satisfactorily. 

 Of course a part of the eggs are removed to 

 give place to the larger queen-cells. I might 

 as well say that I do not know why more 

 than those nece,*sai'y are removed unless the 

 bees are thrown into an abnormal condition 

 by manipulation. 1 have often noticed that 

 eggs do vanish, as by magic, under certain 

 conditions where a colony is made queen- 

 less, and especially from a nucleus under 

 the strenuous circumstances of trying to see 

 how man}' queens can be gotten from it in 

 a season. "\Vhere we allow the young mated 

 queen to staj- in her nucleus till the first 100 

 or more eggs have hatched, before taking 

 her away for shipping, every egg will be 

 hatched; but if she is taken away when she 

 has beeh laying t)nly from twelve to thirty- 

 six hours the larger part will disappear. 

 And if this early withdi'awal is continued 

 the nucleus will become so weak after a 

 month or two tliat it will succumb to robbers 

 when a time of scarcity occurs. Who among 

 the readers can give u.«; further light? 



He next asks, '' What becomes of the 

 eggs? Do the bees eat them? " I would not 

 say that the bees always eat these missing 

 eggs; for I am aware that where bees are 

 drummed or sliaken into a box so as to 

 make a new colony of the drummed swarm, 

 as we used to do in what was termed " arti- 

 ficial swarming," thirty to fortj^ years ago, 

 man}' eggs would be found on the board 

 under the box three or four hours later if 

 the queen was laying at her maximum at 

 the time the artificial swarm was made. But 

 I have repeatedly seen bees eating the eggs 

 as they came from a queen when she was 

 suddenly distui'bed so that she drew her 

 abdomen from the cell. 



He now asks, " If the bees eat the eggs 

 which are mL«sing, are they used in the 

 preparation of the royal jelly? If they are, 

 would the eggs of a black or hybrid queen 

 atTect the coloring of the young queens 

 reared from golden Italian larvas?" 



Because bees eat eggs, it does not neces- 

 sarily follow that they enter into the food 

 given the young queen larva?, for, according 

 to my obsenations, hundreds and thousands 

 of eggs are eaten by the bees when they 

 have no disposition to rear queens. In times 

 of great scarcity the cells will be cleared of 

 eggs by tlie thousand, and all ideas of 

 brood-rearing given up; and if fears of the 

 existence of the colony are entertained, even 

 the larva? will be eaten except those about 

 to change to the pupa form, and these will 

 be sucked dry in order that the existence of 

 the colony may be maintained. And even 

 if they did enter into the royal jelly they 

 could only form so small a part of the whole 

 that little or no chance for coloring could 

 be given, even were there any grain of truth 

 in the theory that food of any kind has 

 aught to do with the color of the insect to 

 which it is fed while the insect is in the 

 larval form. From many years of observa- 

 tion I have failed to find that black or 

 hybrid nurses, or eggs or larvfe from a dark 

 queen, in a hive from which Italian queens 

 are being reared, have any thing to do with 

 the coloring of such queens. 



The last question, " What is the shortest 

 time after hatching, the weather being fa- 

 vorable, before the young queen leaves for 

 fertilization ?" 



Five daj'S after maturity is the least 

 number I ever knew to elapse. But in 

 natural swarming, or under most circum- 

 stances Avhere the bees have their own way, 

 and especially where the weather is favor- 

 able and the flow of nectar good, not one 

 queen out of ten is allowed to emerge from 

 its cell at maturity, for under such circum- 

 stances all but the first of the young queens 

 are held by the bees in their cells till a 

 deci.sion is made as to future swarming. 

 Hundreds are held from one to five days in 

 their cells by the worker bees, after they 

 would have gnawed off the capping to their 

 cell, and come out, could they have had their 

 own way. Queens are more often held in 

 their cells in this way than is generally 

 supposed. In one instance I opened a hive 

 and found a young queen piping away 

 vehemently. After looking the hive over I 

 found a queen-cell with a queen in it which 

 I had overlooked when cutting out cells pre- 

 viously. As there were plenty of bees in 

 this hive I took the frame having this cell 

 upon it, bees and all, and formed a nucleus. 

 Tlie queen made a successful flight the next 

 day. and in two days more, or thi'ee days 

 in all, she was laying worker eggs. 



