NOVEMBER 1, 1915 



879 



Dr. C. C. Miller 



;teay 



Marengo, 



r. C. Chadwick asks, p. 837, 

 wliether one of the most important 

 points to be considered in breeding- 

 is not disease-resistance. Yes, 

 i'ricnd Cliadwiek, but that takes 

 oare of itself, for a colony that 

 yields to disease is not likely to 

 give a bij:' yield. Surely, however, I would 

 not breed from a diseased colony. 



A CANADiAtJ inquirer asks whether I 

 have given in " Fifty Years among; the 

 Bees" the way I prevent swarming. T think 

 to no other problem in beekeepirig have I 

 given so much thought and elfort as to that 

 of pre\ention of swarming, and the results 

 are given very full}' in that book. It gives 

 at least how I li-y to .prevent it, although I 

 do not always succeed. 



The presence of laying workers is not 

 ha I'd to recognize after their brood is seal- 

 ed; but it is desirable to detect it sooner. 

 The scattering of egg's and unsealed brood 

 is an indication ; j-et I have known laying 

 workers to fill worker comb just as regular- 

 ly as the best queen could do it, with one 

 egg in each cell. I think that is likely to be 

 the case when there is little or no drone- 

 comb present. Often the first indication 

 of laying workers is the finding of more 

 than one egg in a queen-cell; yet I have 

 known a good queen to lay more than one 

 egg in a queen-cell in a very few cases. 

 Pollen in a queen-cell is a pretty certain 

 sign — perhaps entirely certain. If you find 

 eggs in drone-cells, especially if more than 

 one egg in a cell, wldle plenty of worker- 

 cells are unoccupied, you may be sure 30U 

 have a case of laying workers. The cure? 

 The best cure is to break up the colony. 



G. M. DoorjTTLE insists on combs II/2 

 inches from center to center, p. 796. His 

 good judgment and long experience entitle 

 his views to great consideration. Yet it 

 would cost heavily to depart from the al- 

 most universally established 1%, and we 

 should all be willing to concede something 

 for the sake of uniformity. Sometimes, 

 however, the difference is so great that it 

 pays to stand alone; and if Mr. Doolittle 

 thinks so in this case, I respect him for tlie 

 departure. [This question was argued quite 

 thoroughly twenty years ago. There was a 

 general belief that IV2 is better for store- 

 corab, and 1^,4 or 1% for brood-comb. The 

 closer the sjjacing, the more it discourages 

 the rearing of drone brood. Some even 

 went so far as to argue at the time that 

 V/.\ spacing would shut out drone brood 



entirely. A gieat many in England favored 

 IVi spacing. We know of no one, except 

 for the pi'oduetion of extracted honey, who 

 would space wider than l^^. We decided 

 in our bee-supply department on 1% as a 

 very nice compromise. — Ed.] 



^'e Editor suggests, p. 790, that, by the 

 newspaper plan of uniting, the bees in the 

 upper hive might smother on a hot day. As 

 a strong colony is not used in uniting, there 

 is little danger; yet it is well to be on the 

 lookout, and so, thanks for the suggestion. 

 [We once placed a comparatively weak 

 colony, that we were treating for foul 

 brood, over a bee-escape board with a Porter 

 bee-escape. The escape was clogged with 

 dead bees, but we did not know it. The 

 day was very liot ; and before night the bees 

 smothered, the combs melted down, and the 

 honey ran out between the cracks of the 

 upper and lower stories. Robbing got 

 started, and you'd better believe we had 

 trouble in cleaning that yard of foul brood, 

 and it was two years before we dared to 

 mo^'e any bees out of it. For that reason 

 we would feel a little cautious about put- 

 ting even a weak colonj' above a newspaper 

 for fear that a hot day might come in 

 October, or several of them, and melt the 

 vv'hole business down. — Ed.] 



Wesley Dibble^ you say, p. 769, that if 

 you're not mistaken all the introducing- 

 cages require opening the brood-nest for 

 introducing queens and remo^dng cages. In 

 most of my introducing I don't open the 

 hive at all. Without any opening, the cage 

 is thrust into the entrance of the hive, the 

 Xo. 3 Miller cage being arranged so the 

 bees cannot get at the candy. Two days 

 later the cage is drawn out and the candy 

 exposed. Then the cage can be taken out 

 any time after the queen has left it. [This 

 manner of introducing would be all right 

 with queens bred in the same yard and 

 during warm weather; but in our opinion 

 queens so introduced that have just come 

 out of the mail-bags would not be as read- 

 ily accepted as tlie same queens in cages 

 put between the frames of brood near the 

 center of the brood-nest. As a matter of 

 fact, a fresh laying queen can often be let 

 loose into a colony in the same yard just 

 made queenless. The theory seems to be 

 that if the bees do not discover that they 

 are queenless they are not looking for or 

 expecting to find a new laying queen, and 

 the interloper goes on with her egg-laying 

 the same as her predecessor, and the bees 

 apparently none the wiser. — Ed.] 



