April 30, 1903. 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



211 



and renew its power to destroy as soon as the bees put in 

 their honey, pollen or larva. 



In one of our counties just north I saw a peculiar in- 

 stance. I was passing by with my liveryman — seeini;^ some 

 bee-hives, and it being noou-tirae, I said to him : " I would 

 rather eat dinner with a farmer bee-keeper than to go to the 

 hotel." We went in and I took dinner there, and he wanted 

 to know my mission, and soon : he said to me : "My wife 

 has a swarm of bees ; I used to have a good many swarms 

 and they all died." He was anxious to keep bees, and, be- 

 ing a mason by trade, he had sealed the entrances of those 

 hives ; eggs had been deposited there, and he had stored 

 away those hives with those black scales in, in the granary ; 

 eight years afterwards a swarm of bees came there and 

 alighted in an apple-tree back of the house. The wife, not 

 knowing where those hives were, took a square cracker-bos 

 for a hive and put the bees into that, and they did fairly 

 well, in a good, old-fashioned way ; they filled up the box. 

 She wandered oflf on missionary work one day to some of 

 her neighbors, and being away the next time they swarmed 

 he, coming down from the field, saw the bees out on the 

 tree. " Now," he thought, " I have some hives, I will hive 

 them on a full set of clean combs ;" and he did. He wanted 

 me to examine the hive. I turned it up and got that pecu- 

 liar odor. I said to him : " I want you to know to your 

 satisfaction that I am right." I opened it up and took out 

 the comb, and there were the sunken cappings, the ropy 

 stage, and plenty of it ; and over in the corner, where there 

 was no brood at all, I found those black, dried-down scales 

 of eight years ago. Then I went up to the granary and 

 found many diseased combs there. I told him to make up 

 a good fire in the big iron kettle and we would fix it. 



A Member — Would you work on the McEvoy plan, or 

 starve the brood ? 



Mr. France — Well, if I mistake not that is the McEvoy 

 plan ; we starve them just long enough to get out of that lit- 

 tle bee the diseased honey. 



A Member — I shook the bees off on starters and left 

 them to go in and out as they pleased. The starving plan 

 is closing the hive up with screenings, and the bees worried 

 themselves to death ; when I tried it I lost almost half of 

 them. 



Mr. France — If you screen them, and put them in a cool 

 place and give them a little water they will be all right, 

 otherwise they get annoyed ; in almost all cases I leave the 

 hive open, narrowed down to keep the robber-bees from 

 coming in. 



A Member — Providing a number of combs that had 

 contained foul brood had been stored away, how long after- 

 ward might the odor of foul brood be detected — one, two, 

 three, or four years ? 



Mr. France — I don't think you would get very much of 

 it a year afterwards ; it becomes so dried down and hard it 

 would be hard to detect it. 



A Member — What is the first stage by which it can be 

 detected ? If you don't know you have it in your yard how 

 do you go to work to find it ? 



Mr. France — I question whether the naked eye could 

 detect it ; there would be no difference in the outward ap- 

 pearance. 



A Member — In regard to the perforations — is it not a 

 fact that you can not go to a healthy colony and find those 

 perforations in the cells? Isn't it about 99 cases out of 

 100, you may say, that you do find those perforated cappings ? 

 It is just as if you had put a needle or pin in the cell. Is 

 that not unmistakably foul brood ? 



Mr. France — Pickled brood may have ; it is a very good 

 guide-board. 



A Member— With the foul brood the cappings don't be- 

 gin to sink until after the gases leave the larvae, do they ? 



Mr. France — Just as they begin. 



A Member— Directly the gases leave the larva?,'-which 

 causes pressure on the top of the cell, directly the gases are 

 released by that perforation, you may say the cappings then 

 recede and have that sunken appearance, don't they ? 



Mr. France — Yes. 



(Continued next week.) 



Amerikanische Bienenzucht, by Hans Buschbauer, is 

 a bee-keeper's handbook of 138 pages, which is just what 

 our German friends will want. It is fully illustrrated. and 

 neatly bound in cloth. Price, postpaid, SI. 00 ; or with the 

 American Bee Journal one year— both for SI. 75. Address 

 all orders to this office. 



X.^4>^.^«.^.j!CJ!i.JiC^^C^iC^..M>^>J>C^.^:CJit.AL^>C^M 



L Contributed Articles. 



*r>rK 



Rearing Long-Lived Bees and Queens. 



BV DK. E. I.ALLl'P. 



DEC. 16 and 17, our Southern California Bee-Keepers' 

 Association had a meeting in Los Angeles. I dropped 

 in on the 17th and was told they had drawn Gallup 

 " over the coals " for condemning all our Eastern queen- 

 breeders. Of course, I denied that point-blank. But I did, 

 and do still, condemn the rearing of queens and having the 

 cells built and cared for in small nuclei. It is positively 

 the deterioration of our bees in the worst possible manner. 

 So when I came home on the 20th, here was the American 

 Bee Journal and C. P. Dadant's article. Now, can it be 

 possible that I am such a dull writer that I cannot make 

 myself understood, or what is the matter ? 



Now, Mr. Dadant, you say it would be a waste of time 

 for anybody to tell you that your bees were inferior, etc. Did 

 Gallup ever tell you that queens reared in the manner you 

 speak of were inferior ? Certainly not, for that is exactly 

 what I have been teaching. 



Mr. Dadant sums up finally, by saying, " In my opinion 

 we must rear our queens in good, healthy colonies," and 

 here again I do not disagree with him one particle. I have 

 reared just as good queens as can be reared in this manner. 

 Take my best colony in every respect, and I prefer the 

 leather-colored queen instead of the light-colored one ; make 

 the colony extra strong in numbers, by filling the hives to 

 overflowing with nursing bees from other colonies. Now I 

 am so foolish as to think that I get more good cells built 

 in a colony thus prepared, and am sure to get every cell 

 with an extra-large amount of royal jelly to support the 

 embryo. Every cell will contain a good queen, etc. 



We do not have any poor cells and poor queens to de- 

 stroy or discard ; Mr. Alley says he does with his nucleus- 

 reared queens. Now, my 36-frame hives were the small 

 Gallup frame, not the Langstroth frame. I only spoke of 

 one queen living 6 years, and her wing was clipped, so that 

 I know. I received the queen from Adam Grimm as a 

 present, and did not use her in my 36-frame hive, as it was 

 before I even thought of getting up such a hive. I know 

 that I have had a number of queens since that lived 4 or 5 

 years. I futhermore know that I have had quite a number 

 of queens that would, and did, occupy 16 Langstroth combs 

 with brood ; I have had 3 within the past two seasons — 

 tramp swarms — that I picked up, and naturally reared at 

 that, and common black bees, no one had anything to do 

 with their rearing. 



When I took Mr. Kenny's bees, in Ventura county, I 

 selected 2 leather-colored queens in 10-frame Langstroth 

 hives to breed from. I commenced stimulating the first of 

 February with diluted honey. I used the hives two stories 

 high, both queens fully occupied 16 frames with eggs and 

 brood, and I had 36 good queens from them by natural 

 swarming, saving every one of them. I hived the 2 swarms 

 when they came out, on ready-made worker-combs, and in 

 21 days each queen had its 1() combs filled with brood and 

 eggs. I sold out to Mr. Mclntyre, and he said in the con- 

 vention the other day that that stock still leads all the 

 apiaries in that section of the country for productiveness 

 and profit. He is the Secretary of our Association— I say 

 " our," because they unanimously elected Gallup an honor- 

 ary member. He says there is not a queen in existence 

 whose bees live from the first of May until the first of Sep- 

 tember. Well, I guess that is so. 



Now, I must tell the circumstances, surroundings, etc. : 

 When I moved to Iowa I purchased 65 acres of land in the 

 edge of a body of heavy timber, and clean, rolling prairie, 

 one mile out. I purchased the timber as a splendid location 

 for bee-keeping, as I had lived on the open prairie in Wis- 

 consin aud did not like the locality for bee-keeping, as it 

 was too windy, and not a good variety of flowers. Well, I 

 cleared up 6 acres, and yarded my sheep on it ; they killed 

 all the sprouts, and in two years pretty thoroughly covered 

 the land with rich sheep-manure, and then I sowed it to 

 white clover and got a splendid stand. This was the first 

 white clover in that part of the State. I cleared up a few 

 acres more for orchard, vegetable garden, etc., on the east 

 side of the house ; the clearing was a strip of land, before 



