156 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



March 12, 1903. 



o'clock p.m. and six o'clock the next morning, a swarm 

 may be expected during- the next nine hours, if the day is 

 favorable. Should there be high winds, cold or rain, the 

 swarm will stay quietly in the old hive, and if such weather 

 continues unabated for one, two, three, four, five, six or 

 seven days, the colony tiiay keep these queen-cells, and 

 swarm on the first favorable day that comes ; in which case 

 should they be kept back from four to seven days, it might 

 be truthfully said that the young queens were about to 

 hatch or emerge from their cells. But not one swarm out 

 of 500 ever issues under these circumstances, for by the 

 time three or four foul days have occurred, the bees begin 

 to feel poor from the lack of honey coming into the hive, 

 give up swarming, tear down the queen-cells, and carry the 

 embryo queens from the hive. But I have known, in one or 

 two cases, the bees to preserve these young queens under 

 unfavorable weather till the eighth day, when one or more 

 of the young queens would emerge from their cells soon 

 after the swarm had left ; and one of these cases was this 

 last summer, during which it rained 28 out of the 30 days in 

 June, and 24 out of the 31 days in July. Then the writer 

 says that the " young bees " are allowed to remain and rear 

 a queen. 



We often hear that the old bees go with the swarm, and 

 the young bees remain in the old hive. This is as I find the 

 matter : Bees of all ages, except those so young that they 

 can not fly, accompany the swarm, and those of ail ages 

 stay with the old colony. Hundreds of times have I seen 

 the ground in front of the hive covered with bees from six 

 to ten hours old, all white and fuzzy, and too young to fly, 

 that had tried to go with the swarm, and I never yet hived 

 a swarm but what I could find hundreds of these young 

 bees just a little older, enough so that they could barely fly, 

 hanging in the cluster with the other bees, some of which 

 were so old that their wings were nearly worn off. Nature 

 makes no mistakes. If only old bees accompanied the 

 swarm, these old bees would die of old age before any young 

 bees would emerge from the cells in the newly-formed 

 home, for where bees build their own combs, as they always 

 do when combs are not supplied by man, it must be 23 to 24 

 days before many, if any, young bees appear, and this is 

 more than half of the lifetime allotted to worker-bees at 

 this season of the year. 



DIFPERENCE BETWEEN PRIME AND FIRST SWARMS. 



On page S39 (1902), I see I am asked to tell " what is the 

 difference between a prime swarm and a first swarm." As 

 I understand it, a prime swarm is a swarm that is perfect, 

 or at its best at the time of issuing, or such a swarm as we 

 have been talking about in this article, where the mother 

 queen accompanies the swarm, which is composed of bees 

 of all ages. A first swarm may be a prime swarm, and it 

 may not be. In cases where the old or mother-queen dies 

 in or about the swarming season, the bees will proceed to 

 rear a queen from the brood left after her death, when, in 

 due time, the first young queen will emerge from her cell 

 and lead out the ///j/ swarm, which would be to all intents 

 and purposes an ajter-swarin, except that it might have a 

 larger number of bees with it than most after-swarms have. 



If I wrote that a " prime swarm is often erroneously 

 called a first swarm," such was done without fully consid- 

 ering the form of expression I was using. It should be ex- 

 pressed that a first swarm is often erroneously called a 

 prime swarm. 



FORMING NUCLEI. 



On page 583 (1902), is an article from the pen of Dr. 

 Miller, in which he conclusively proves that in his locality, 

 and with his bees, it is possible to form nuclei from bees 

 and combs taken from a colony having a laying queen, 

 without taking any precaution as to keeping them from 

 returning to their old home. In my former articles on this 

 subject, I told just what had happened with me when I had 

 tried such a plan, and I had supposed that bees would act the 

 same with other people as they did with me, so, perhaps, I 

 was too sweeping in my assertion, that were two bushels of 

 bees taken from a colony having a laying queen, and placed 

 in a new hive on combs of brood, without any precautions 

 being taken, they would all stampede for home without 

 leaving enough to form a decent nucleus. And that was 

 just as I have found it, in conducting scores of experiments 

 along this line, only the two bushels of bees were not gen- 

 erally used. 



But last season gave me a surprise. As it rained 

 nearly all the while during the month of June, when I must 

 form my nuclei for queen rearing, and not having enough 

 queenless bees to form what I wanted, I, one day in my 



desperation, formed some nuclei in just the way Dr. Miller 

 says he did, and plenty of bees staid for them to " hold the 

 fort." This seemed so strange to me, in view of my former 

 experience, that I set to thinking, and I remembered that it 

 had been over a week since the bees had flown, and for this 

 reason quite a share of the bees taken did not know of any 

 other home than the place they were put in. Besides this, 

 it kept cold and stormy so they could not fly under three 

 days after I formed these nuclei, so that this added much to 

 their disposition to stay " where put." 



But later on, when the bees were flying every day, I 

 tried again in the same way, and had the same difficulty 

 that I always had, of going to the nucleus hives the next 

 morning only to find the combs deserted, except a few very 

 young, fuzzy bees, the most of which had emerged from the 

 brood in the combs given them. 



I am not positive, but the reading of Dr. Miller's article 

 above referred to, looks as if he might have formed his col- 

 onies (if not nuclei) by taking bees from several colonies 

 having queens, and putting them together to form new col- 

 onies. If he did this, I should expect them to stay much 

 better, for where I wish bees taken from a colony having a 

 laying queen to stay where I put them, I take the bees 

 from several colonies, mix them all up, and then form a 

 colony of these mixed bees (small or large), and the larger 

 part of them will adhere to the combs of brood in the new 

 location. This mixing process seems to disconcert them, 

 causing them to be so confused that they forget their 

 anxiety to get back home, until they become accustomed to 

 the surrounding circumstances. Onondaga Co., N. Y. 



No. 3— The Hive Problem— More About Size 

 and Shape. 



THERE is no doubt in my mind as to the failure of the 

 present form of hive to fill the bill in results. As I 

 have shown in the two preceding articles, the regular 

 Langstroth hive is not as fully suited to our needs as might 

 be, for wintering it is too wide — or rather long — for its 

 depth, and is not easy to contract or expand. However, I 

 believe if bee-keepers would use either 6 or 7 frames to the 

 chamber, filling out the remaining space with dummies or 

 followers, then at all times outside of the harvest flow carry 

 them two deep, that better results would be accomplished. 



I have for several years advocated the lOframe hive for 

 this territory, doing so because the 8-frame hive was too 

 small. I have not changed my mind in the least as to size 

 except to favor even larger than the 10-frame ; I now think 

 that very often a 12 frame is not any too much. I consider 

 the shape of the Langstroth hive as not satisfactory, be- 

 cause it must be too large in its top surface to get proper 

 depth without getting the hive too big during the harvest, 

 so as a compromise, and to continue the use of that hive, I 

 doubled up, thereby getting depth without enlarging the 

 super surface. It is more natural for the bees to have the 

 depth about twice the width, in any event have the depth 

 considerably more than width and length. The Langstroth 

 frame is too long, but used as I have indicated, two sets 

 deep, it is not so bad. 



One reason why I am adopting the 8 frame width, is be- 

 cause its width approximates the proper proportion as to 

 height when the hive is two stories high, or one story with 

 2 or 3 supers on A two-story Langstroth hive, whether the 

 same depth is in brood-chambers or equivalent in supers or 

 combination, is about 20 inches. If a little was cut off the 

 end of the hive and put on its height, it would be almost 

 idea!. With the hives of these proportions I am confident 

 we can get better average filling of the supers, and there 

 being but 24 sections instead of 28 they will be filled and 

 ready to come off sooner. If one wants to keep supers on 

 longer they can be raised and others put below, yet the 

 travel over the finished sections raised to the top is reduced 

 to a minimum. Still another advantage is that when a 

 super is raised and a fresh one put under, work will be 

 pushed more rapidly in the new one, and work going on 

 freely in the super ahuays lessens the crowding of the 

 brood-chamber. If a colony can once be gotten to work in 

 the super, we have in a very large degree gotten the control 

 of that colony to keep down swarming, and to get steady 

 and good super work. 



To accomplish more nearly what I have just been out- 

 lining as to shape of hive, I am adopting a new divisible- 



