694 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



Nov. 15 



CONVERSATIONS WITH 

 DOOLITTLE 



AT Borodino, New York. 



THE AMOUNT OF SURPLUS HONEY WHICH ONE 

 BEE CAN PRODUCE. 



Mr. Doolittle, Mr. Barker and I were talking, a week 

 or so ago, about the amount of honey a single bee 

 could gather, and he claimed that one bee might gather 

 a pound. Do you believe this? 



If a single bee could gather a pound of 

 honey in its lifetime, many of the problems 

 that confront bee-keepers in the early spring 

 would be solved; for the reason that the api- 

 arist usually desires a large number of bees 

 in the spring, because each individual bee 

 collects so small a part of the accumulated 

 whole during the surplus-flow. But in most 

 localities flowers which yield nectar do not 

 usually last through the life of an individual 

 bee, while many bees, perhaps more than 

 half, that may be reared by the most skillful 

 management, never add any thing to the 

 surplus stores. 



If every bee reared could have a field of 

 nectar placed before it in which to labor, 

 then it would be right to keep the colonies 

 always strong; but inasmuch as this can not 

 be, and since the bees at all times must be 

 consumers, whether they are producing or 

 not, there are times when there is no object 

 in having a colony strong in bees, when, be- 

 cause of necessity, they must be consumers 

 only. 



A part of the bees must become consum- 

 ers instead of producers; and another factor 

 comes in here, which is the supply of nectar. 

 In reality we must consider the source of 

 supply first; for without it we should not 

 have any use for the bees whatever. With 

 a continuous uninterrupted honey-flow with- 

 in four miles of the hive in every direction 

 during the time of the bee's flight, when it 

 may work in the field, I think that a bee 

 could easily gather one ounce of nectar, since 

 this would mean that there would have to be 

 only 1600 bees to gather 100 pounds. Of this 

 amount it would take at least 25 pounds to 

 supply the wants of the colony during the 

 time when the bees were living; and unless 

 the nectar were thicker than it is here, it 

 would take 3 pounds of it to make one of 

 honey. This would leave only 25 pounds of 

 honey, then, as the product of the 1600 bees 

 that had access through their life to the un- 

 interrupted flow. However,. a good nectar 

 flow during the whole natural life of the sin- 

 gle bee is something that is rarely found. 



Some years ago fhad a colony during ap- 



Ele bloom which I estimated to contain 4000 

 ees. I counted all the bees on a given sur- 

 face of the comb, and divided the amount of 

 comb in the hive equally well covered with 

 bees by the area of the space counted, and 

 multiplied the quotient by the number of 

 bees on this surface counted. The next day 

 was a fine one, and apple-trees were yiela- 

 ing as well as I ever knew them to. At 7 

 o'clock in the morning the bees began to 



work; and at 8 I found that 60 loaded bees 

 were going into the hive each minute on the 

 average. By estimating the gain, and cal- 

 culating with a dropper, 1 found that it would 

 take about 3600 such loads to make one 

 pound, so I concluded that 4000 bees were 

 good for gathering one pound of nectar each 

 hour, besides caring for the interior of the 

 hive. 1 weighed the hive before a bee had 

 left in the morning so that I could tell the 

 gain in nectar when night came. The bees 

 worked right along at the average of 60 per 

 minute until 4 o'clock in the afternoon, when 

 they began to slacken up, and at 5 o'clock all 

 had ceased working, as the sky became 

 cloudy shortly after 4 o'clock. 



At 6 o'clock I weighed the hive again, 

 thinking to myself as I did so, that, if fhad 

 estimated correctly, it should weigh about 8 

 pounds more than it did in the morning. 

 I found that the actual gain in weight was 8 

 pounds 9 ounces. I was greatly surprised 

 the next morning, however, to find that the 

 8 pounds 9 ounces had diminished to but 

 little more than 3 pounds, thus showing 

 that the nectar gathered and somewhat 

 evaporated during the day was far from the 

 consistency of honey capped over in the 

 cells. From this I became infatuated with 

 the idea that much honey could be secured 

 from this source if I had 40,000 bees in the 

 hive instead of 4000, so I began trying to get 

 my colonies as strong as possible in the early 

 spring. After unfavorable weather for the 

 next five years, so that the bees got scarcely 

 a living during the apple bloom, I gave up 

 the plan, trying only to have the colonies 

 strong for clover and basswood. 



The great point of all this is that we first 

 have the fiela or location, of which we should 

 have a thorough knowledge. Next we have 

 the colonies to get strong just in time to take 

 advantage of the main nectar- flow from the 

 field, wnether the source be fruit-bloom, 

 clover, basswood, buckwheat, or fall flowers. 

 Third, a bee is of little value as a honey- 

 gatherer unless it can be placed in the field 

 in time for one of these flows. 



BEES FLYING FROM HIVES IN A CELLAR. 



I believe that many healthy bees are lost at the time 

 when they carry out dead bees. When a bee brings 

 out a dead bee, it generally falls off the bottom-board 

 with the dead one, and, of course, is lost Many dead 

 bees are four or five feet away from the hives, and 

 this is what makes me think they were alive when 

 they left the hive. 



Nerstrand, Minn. J. BeCKLEY. 



[To the above, Mr. Doolittle replies:] 



As a rule, bees leave the hive to die when the tem- 

 perature is high enough for them to fly, and for this 

 reason the larger share of the bees which die while 

 they are being wintered in the cellar go out on the 

 cellar bottom to do so; therefore we have many dead 

 bees on the cellar bottom and few in the hive, where 

 good wintering, with the proper temperature, exists. 



Again, I have observed, hundreds of times, bees 

 dragging out their dead when colonies were outdoors, 

 or when wintering on their summer stands; and, al- 

 though I have often watched for this state of affairs in 

 the cellar, yet I have never seen a sinsle bee lugging 

 about a dead companion; and all my observations lead 

 me to believe that the dead bees are never removed by 

 the live bees while the colony is wintering in the 

 cellar. 



