1909 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



477 



ft 



WHERE DID THOSE BLACK DRONES COME FROM? 



I have a colony of eolden Adel bees. This spring 

 they ran a little short of stores; so I put a body con- 

 taining combs of honey on top of them and a queen- 

 excluder between. I left them that way for about two 

 weeks; then I looked at them one day and found quite 

 a lot of drone brood in the upper story, and, to my 

 surprise, 1 found cjuite a lot of black drones in the up- 

 per story. How did those bl.ick drones get there? and 

 how did the brood get in the upper story. These top 

 combs were kept over from last year. There are black 

 bees in the neighborhood. 



A SWARM THAT DID NOT GO WHERE THE SCOUTS HAD 

 BEEN WORKING. 



One morning, about six o'clock, we saw some bees 

 working in a crack in the siding at the end of our 

 house. They worked quite bu^ily for a while. About 

 eleven o'clock I went out on the porch and found 

 there a swarm of bees circling around the house; so I 

 went out, when they began to drift away; and as I fol- 

 lowed them they went to the woods and clustered on a 

 large oak-tree, and, after a while, they went into a 

 knot-hole. It would seem that they intended going 

 into the house. 



Pierceton, Ind., June 25. Jacob Garber. 



[The presence of black drones among your yellow 

 bees could be explained on two grounds — first, drones 

 of any colony are tolerated anywhere. If there are 

 black bees in your vicinity it would be perfectly natu- 

 ral to find black drone^ in your hives with yellow 

 bees. Second, drones from a queen will very often 

 vary in markings. We have seen drones from an 

 Italian queen that were quite dark-colored, and others 

 from the same queen light-colored. The presumption 

 is, however, that the black drones you find in your 

 hive of yellow bees came from other colonies in your 

 vicinity. — ED.j 



a question in regard to introducing. 



If one should set an empty hive in the place of a full 

 one, taking one frame of brood with the queen on and 

 putting it in the empty hive, and then set the full hive 

 on a new stand, would that full hive be an extra good 

 place to introduce a queen? Or would it be better to 

 move the old queen to the new stand and introduce the 

 new queen on the old stand? How li>ng before intro- 

 ducing should the change be made? and at what time 

 of the year? W. C. Brown. 



Camdm, N. J. 



As a general principle, we may say, when forming 

 nuclei for the purpose of providing places in which to 

 intoduce queens, each nucleus should be put on a new 

 stand. In 24 hours all the old flying bees will have 

 gone back to the old stand. You may now with cam- 

 parative saft-ty introduce a queen to the nucleus, be- 

 cause the young bees will usually treat a strange 

 mother very kindly. To answer your question direct- 

 ly, we may say that the plan you propose is in con- 

 formity with the above-stated principle. You will also 

 see that it would be wrong practice to introduce a 

 queen to the hive on the old stand, because it would 

 have mainly old bees.— Ed.] 



A test for pure ITALIANS; THE MARKINGS OF THE 

 DRONES OR THE QUEEN NOT A CRITERION. 



A neighbor had last year a fine colony of " hybrids " 

 which I advised him to Italianize. He accordingly 

 sent to a prominent breeder for a queen, which came 

 in due season, and was successfully introduced. The 

 workers were beautifully marked, and the colony win- 

 tered in fine order; but when the drones began to 

 make an appearance, about a third of them were as 

 black as any in a native colony. The remaining two- 

 thirds were as finely marked as are the workers. Can 

 you put on your thinking-cap and tell why this is so ? 



Armstrong, la., July 1. W. O. Atkinson. 



(The test of pure Italian bees is not in the markings 

 of the drones but in the worker bees. The drones of a 

 pure mother may vary all the way from a quite dark 

 color to a light yellow; but the worker bees themselves 

 must be uniformly marked. They must have not less 

 than three yellow bands; and while a fourth or fifth 

 may show on some bees, yet these extra bands do not 

 show typical Italians, but, rather, "sports." In the 

 same way the queen-bees from a pure mother will, 

 vary almost as much as the drones.— ED.J 



and combs would be a valuable item if I had them 

 emptied; but as I have been working for comb honey 

 only I have no means of emptying them except feed- 

 ing back at the entrance, which is much too slow. 



Elkin, Pa., July 16. W. A. Stewart. 



I While you can extract the honey out of the sections 

 and melt up the combs, your better way is to cut the 

 combs out of the sections and melt them up. A cap- 

 ping-melter will do this work very nicely, although 

 any double boiler will answer very well providing you 

 know how to do the wi'rk. The article on p. 399, July 

 1, written by H. H. Root, shows the whole process. — 

 ED. I 



BEES DO NOT INJURE SOUND PEACHES. 



The bees were very thick on the peaches of one 

 small tree here, even five or six in a hole in some of 

 them. I picked every peach that was bruised or in- 

 jured in anyway. Upon visiting the tree the follow- 

 ing day the bees were flying quite thick among the 

 branches of the tree. By watching I found they did 

 not trouble the peaches. There was one peach that 

 they kept crawling over, and on examining I found 

 one end was soft but the skin was not broken. It was 

 the peach-rot and not the bees that injured the fruit. 



Newburyport, Mass., Feb. 15. H. J. FOWLE. 



[Yes, it has been proven over and over again that 

 bees will not molest sound or perfect fruit. Peach- 

 rot, or insects with sharp cutting jaws must attack the 

 fruit before the bees will notice it.— Ed.] 



WHAT TO DO WITH SECTIONS CONTAINING A LARGE 

 A.MOUNT OF HONEY-DEW. 



This year the bees have gathered so much honey- 

 dew that it has made the early crop of white honey 

 unfit for table use. We have about 600 sections; and 

 to offer it for sale would ruin our trade. The sections 



THE \CaH00-TREE. 



Is the basswood-tree the true wahoo-tree or not ? If 

 not, what is the difference? I can not find the word 

 " wahoo " in Webster. A. M. HENDRICK. 



Silica, Ark., June 28. 



[The "wahoo-tree," so called in some parts of the 

 South, is another name for one of the basswoods— 

 Tilia heterophylla. All the different species of Tilia 

 yield honey. Whether the Tilia heterophylla is as 

 good a honey-plant as the Tilia Americana, we can not 

 say — probably not. The last mentioned is usually the 

 producer of the honey known as basswood on the 

 open market. There are two or three other species— 

 Tilia Europcea and Tilia argentea, very often called the 

 silver-leaf basswood. We have a specimen of one of 

 these growing on our premises. The leaves are very 

 dark green, the under side having a silvery-white or 

 grayish look. — Ed.] 



WHY WAS THE COMB CUT DOWN TO THE MIDRIB? 



I have a colony of bees that prepared to swarm by 

 raising drones and starting queen-cells. I then placed 

 an empty shallow extracting-super under the brood- 

 nest, which is an eight-frame Langstroth hive having 

 a shallow super almost full of honey on top. This jut- 

 ting super underneath stopped swarming all right; 

 but here is the point: The bees cut all their combs 

 down to the foundation in the brood-apartment, not 

 working in the shallow super below. The colony has 

 a good queen. This cutting down takes place as soon 

 as brood hatches out. The combs are old, and have 

 no mold on them, which may have caused them to do 

 this. Two weeks later they are starting to build these 

 combs up again. May be some Gleanings readers 

 can tell why they do this. 



WHERE did THE LARV.'E COME FROM? 



Here is another one: I formed a nucleus, taking four 

 frames out of a hive which was superseding the 

 queen. On these four frames I left two queen-cells, 

 one hatched, and I used the other cell for another pur- 

 pose. The queen was lost in mating. There was no 

 brood left in this hive except what was capped after 

 the queen was lost. I found eight queen-cells started. 

 Where did these eggs or larvae come from? No other 

 larvae or eggs were in this hive when cells were 

 found. 



Portsmouth, 0., July 26. A. W. Ackerman. 



[Bees will gnaw comb down sometimes when filled 

 with old pollen or when they are spaced too close. 

 They will also do it under normal conditions in patches 

 or little at a time, and rebuild; but under conditions 

 you name, when they tore down all the comb to the 

 midrib, we are frank to say we don't know what should 

 have caused them to do it. 



As to your second question, there are two ways for 

 accounting for the eggs: First, there might have been 

 eggs or larvae in the hive you did not see; second, bees, 

 in a few cases that seem well authenticated, have 

 been known to steal an egg or two from another hive. 

 From what you say we should be inclined to believe 

 that the cells you refer to were supplied by the last 

 method.— ED.l 



