MAY 15, 1912 



301 



the buckwheat i)roduct. Mr. Shattuck in- 

 formed nie that no disagreeable results fol- 

 low the free use of this honey as an article 

 of food by the members of his family. 



1 wish to say, however, that I was very 

 much inclined to be skei)tical as to its be- 

 ing more of what miglit be called a medical 

 product than a food, like the honey from 

 Brazil, some of which can be used as a med- 

 icine only, owing to the poisonous source 

 from which it is gathered. But in this I 

 am happily disappointed, as no bad quali- 

 ties peculiar to this plant seem to be in the 

 honey when ripened by the bees and placed 

 under favorable surroundings after being 

 removed from the hive. It would seem 

 that this locality in the Connecticut A" alley 

 and adjacent territory with its broad acres 

 of tobacco bloom between the buckwheat 

 flow and the fall flowers would be what the 

 buckwheat fields are to the Alexander apia- 

 ry in New York, where hundreds of colonies 

 are kept in one locality alone, with remark- 

 able success in securing a honey harvest. 



Waterbury, Ct., March 20. 



PUTTING THE SWARM ON THE OLD STAND 

 WITH THE PARENT COLONY BESIDE IT 



BY DR. C. C. MILLER 



A Canadian correspondent writes that in 

 1910 he fell upon a plan of management by 

 which he got from a black colony -100 pounds 

 extracted clover honey. The season was so 

 l)Oor in 1911 that he could not further test 

 the plan, and he wants to know whether I 

 think it will work. He thus describes the 

 plan, which he says is a variation of the 

 put-up plan given in "Fifty Years among 

 the Bees:" 



A colony in a regular eight-frame Langstroth 

 hive had an extracting-super over a queen-exclud- 

 er, and this colony swarmed. To the swarm, which 

 we will call A. were given foundation-starters, and 

 it was set in place of B. the mother colony. B was 

 set beside A. The next day I put an excluder over 

 A. on which I put a super of empty extracting- 

 combs, and over this the super from B. When the 

 young queen began to lay In B. I put B in place of 

 A, put an excluder on B; on this excluder a super 

 of empty extracting-combs, and above this the su- 

 pers that had been on A. A was put on a new 

 stand with Its old black queen, which is five years 

 old this year. 



The first question that arises is one re- 

 garding the safety of the young queen 

 when B is put in place of A, as she is a 

 stranger to all the field bees that enter the 

 hive. But being surrounded by a house- 

 hold of her own bees, she ought to be safe 

 except in a time of scarcity, and she possibly 

 might be safe then. 



Instead of a variation of the put-up plan, 

 you have a variation of the excellent plan 

 of putting the swarm on the old stand, the 

 mother colony beside it, and moving the 

 latter to a new stand in a week or so. Your 

 waiting till the young queen lays before 

 moving the old colony to a new stand will, 

 in a large number of cases, result in one or 

 more afterswarms. You don't want that. 

 I don't see what you gain by swapping 



hives and brood when you make your last 

 move. You certainly lose two weeks or 

 more of hatching brood, for you take from 

 your honey-hive hatching brood, giving in 

 I)lace of it brood that will not begin to hatch 

 out for something like three weeks. In the 

 long run you will probably do better to 

 stick to the old plan. 



This correspondent says further, that, 

 when he gives a ripe cell to a queenless col- 

 ony, the queen hatches out, but is lost on 

 her wedding-trip; but if the bees rear a 

 queen from the egg there is no such loss. 

 1 think it only happened so, and that in 

 general he will find as many losses from 

 wedding-flights in one way as in the other. 



BEES MAY KEEP EGGS FROM HATCHING. 

 A colony swarmed, its young queen was lost, and 

 three weeks from the time the prime swarm issued 

 cells were started with eggs that I am sure were 

 laid by the old queen. How long will fresh eggs 

 keep? Editor Root says fresh eggs keep, if warm, 

 only three days. Not in this locality: they hatch. 



I don't- know enough about the egg busi- 

 ness to speak with authority, but 1 think 

 there may be no unreconcilable conflict in 

 the case. You say that eggs, if kept warm, 

 will hatch in three days. Surely in the 

 case you cite they were kept warm, and 

 they didn't hatch inside of three weeks. 

 You have good backing in saying they will 

 keep long, for no less an authority than 

 Dzierzon reports eggs being kept by the 

 bees. If I remember correctly it was two or 

 three weeks. But when Editor Root says 

 they keep only three days there is not nec- 

 essarily any contradiction, for the probabil- 

 ity is that he is talking about keeping eggs 

 out of the hive, away from the bees. That's 

 the only way in which we are much con- 

 cerned about keeping eggs. 



Without knowing very much about it I 

 think it quite possible that this is what 

 may be found to be true: That, unlike hen's 

 eggs, bees' eggs will not hatch by heat 

 alone without the presence of bees; that 

 bees have the ability to keep them without 

 hatching for a time, and then hatch them 

 afterward. I don't know whether that's 

 true or not; but I do know that in the fall I 

 find in the hive eggs and sealed brood, but 

 no unsealed brood. The queen continues 

 laying, but the bees stop hatching the eggs 

 — or at least the eggs stop hatching. 



Marengo, 111. 



GETTING ALONG WITHOUT QUEEN -EXCLU- 

 DERS 



The Shape of the Brood-nest 



BY GEO. SHIBER 



On page 715, Dec. 1, 1911, is an article 

 from Mr. Doolittle, on the use of queen-ex- 

 cluders. It is not often that my practical 

 experience is much different from his — in 

 fact, I nearly always agree with what he 

 says on bee management. But I want to 

 take an emphatic exception to what he says 

 on the use of excluders in producing ex- 

 tracted honey. 



