iilE BEE-KEEPERS' RhVIEW. 



229 



the bees gradually die off of old age, and in 

 the course of a few weeks or months, accord- 

 ing to the season of the year, the colony be- 

 comes extinct unless aid outside themselves 

 is rendered. Such (lueenless colonies fre- 

 quently develop laying workers which do- 

 |)osit eggs irregularly in worker cells, but 

 they produce only drones. In their eager- 

 ness to perpetuate their colony they some- 

 times even attempt to rear queens from such 

 eggs, but the result is never anything better 

 than drones. 



In February, March and April the queen 

 begins the depositing eggs for the produc- 

 tion of workers in worker comb, one egg in 

 each cell. There are but few at first but 

 when soft maple and willow bloom in April, 

 they increase rapidly and are soon as numer- 

 ous as the bees of the colony can protect 

 from the cold, but in May the strength of 

 the colony increase, which allows an in- 

 creased amount of brood until by the middle 

 of June three-fourths of ttie comb in the hive 

 is occupied by brooti, and this is kept up to 

 a greater or less extent until about the mid- 

 dle of September when the queen ceases lay- 

 ing. To accomplish this the queen often 

 lays as many as three thousand eggs per 

 day. 



The queen deposits eggs in drone cells 

 only in anticipation of swarming or of the 

 superseding of the queen herself, or in other 

 words, in anticipation of the rearing of 

 queens; and as she can only judge of the 

 prospect of swarming from the strength cf 

 her colony, not having any prescience of the 

 character of the coming season, thousands 

 of drones are reared in every apiary that 

 prove to be of no sort of benefit, indeed, it 

 may be safely said that not one in a thousand 

 of those reared at any time ever repays the 

 cost of his production. 



The egg which is to produce a worker 

 hatches and the cell is cai)ped in the same 

 time required in the case of a queen, but the 

 worker does not emerge from the cell until 

 twenty-one days from the laying of the egg 

 has intervened, while the drone requires 

 about twenty-four days to bring him to full 

 maturity. A good queen lives and contin- 

 ues to be useful for from two and a half to 

 live years. The workers live from forty days 

 in the height of the honey season to about 

 eight or nine months from fall to spring. 

 They do all the work except the laying of 

 the eggs. Almost as soon as they are hatch- 

 ed they begin to help with the inside work 



such as the feeding of the larvae, and in from 

 ten to sixteen days, according to circum- 

 stances, they give up home work and turn 

 their attention to the gathering of the ma- 

 terial for honey and bee-bread. The drone 

 does no work and, nevertheless, seldom lives 

 out half his days. When there no longer ap- 

 pears to be a necessity for his continued ex- 

 istence the workers drive him mercilessly 

 out into the cold to starve. Queenless col- 

 onies never drive out their drones, but in a 

 colony in a normal state no drone can be 

 found for more than half the year. 



I shall have said what was intended on this 

 subject when I add that worker brood and 

 drone brood can be readily distinguished by 

 the much greater convexity of the cappings 

 of the drone brood ; these are almost semi- 

 sperical and prominent while those of work- 

 er brood are almost flat ; that the time re- 

 quired for the hatching of brood varies to 

 some extent owing to differences in temper- 

 a':ure — a high temperature hastening ma- 

 turity somewhat, and a low temperature 

 considerably retarding it, and that normal 

 swarming occurs only when considerable 

 nectar is being gathered, if we except an 

 occasional after-swarm just after the close 

 of a honey flow. With this exception 

 swarms that issue at other times are either 

 such as when all the bees of a colony leave 

 their hive with the intention of permanently 

 deserting it on account of starvation, or for 

 some other reason often hard of explana- 

 tion, which is called swarming out and oc- 

 curs generally in early spring, or such as 

 issue because of the excitement and confu- 

 sion which result when several young queens, 

 which have been reared in consequence of 

 the loss of the old one, hatch at about the' 

 same time. These are a sort of after-swarms 

 and are not frequently seen. 



Lapeek, Mich. 



July 1!>. isa^i. 



-?i 



-.^>P^^U'^r^4.k^<^ 



Reasons for Uniting the Bee Keepers' Union 

 and the North American. 



E. T. ABBOTT. 



rn HE question has been asked, shall we 

 'T' merge the Bee- Keepers' Union and the 

 North American into one society 'i I an- 

 swer, by all means, and I am glad that the 

 editor of the Review has taken up the sub- 



