718 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



Stray Stra\vs 



Db. C. C. Miller, Marengo, 111. 



About that queenless-pollen business I 

 think it's this way : If a colony is bringing 

 in pollen it's a sign it has not been queen- 

 less long; but when a colony becomes queen- 

 less it keeps right on gathering pollen till 

 it has an overstock, and then it stops. I 

 never knew a colony long queenless with- 

 out having pollen-clogged combs. 



Mrs. L. C. Axtell^ p. 706, carbon bisul- 

 pliide, recommended by the editor, is the 

 thing for wax-worms, large and small, as 

 well as eggs; but if it's more convenient 

 for you to use sulphur don't take the time 

 to pick out the big fellows the sulphur 

 doesn't kill, but put gasoline in a little oil- 

 can and squirt it on them. 



R. A. Wall uses scraps of galvanized 

 iron or tin for figures on his hives. A 

 right-angled triangle serves for four dif- 

 ferent figures by having the right angle in 

 four different positions. Squares and 

 parallelograms with their different posi- 

 tions serve for the rest. Certainly cheap, 

 and familiarity may make them look like 

 figures. 



Harry G. Brant, you may not have 

 smelled dead bees in the cellar with only 

 two colonies, but you surely would with 25 

 or 100 if you confine them with your wire- 

 cloth frame. At any rate, the bees can 

 smell them, and it would be much better for 

 their health and the health of the family 

 living over the cellar to have the corpses 

 fall on the cellar-floor to be swept up than 

 to have them decaying on the floor-board. 

 Arthur C. Miller is a trouble-maker, 

 always unsettling something that has been 

 considered settled. Now he says in A. B. J., 

 305, "The mere adding of eggs and larvae 

 to a colony with a virgin will almost invari- 

 ably cause her disappearance." That in 

 face of the fact that for years it has been 

 considered the proper thing to give young 

 brood to a nucleus with a virgin to make 

 her lay sooner. Say, Arthur, I find record 

 of nine cases this year in which I gave larvse 

 to nuclei with virgins, and in each case 

 the virgins became laying queens. What's 

 that? "Were there no other cases which 

 failed?" Why^er — well, yes; since you 

 insist upon it, there were eight other cases 

 in which the virgins disajDpeared. But 

 then, virgins have also disappeared when 

 no larvae were given, so the whole thing is 

 left unsettled. Somebody please settle it. 

 [We referred this question to our Mr. Mell 

 Pritchard, who has raised over ten thousand 

 queens. He says he has never been able 

 to discover that the giving of eggs and 



larvcB had any thing to do with hastening 

 the demise of a virgin queen. Indeed, he 

 makes it a practice to give colonies with 

 virgins young brood. Mr. Pritchard is a 

 keen observer; and when it comes to mat- 

 ters relating to queen-rearing we consider 

 him pretty near authority ; and yet on the 

 other hand, we acknowledge that Mr. A. 

 C. Miller on general projiositions is reason- 

 ably correct. Had we not thought so we 

 would not have engaged him in the re- 

 vision of the new edition of the ABC 

 and X Y Z of Bee Culture.— Ed.] 



Samuel Simmins strongly asserted that 

 we were losing by using the L. frame in- 

 stead of his 16 X 10. Then it was shown 

 that the L. frame is really the larger. But 

 Mr. Simmins very properly points out, 

 Canadian B. J., 263, that not the outside, 

 but the inside measurements must be taken, 

 and by that the 16x10 is the larger. He 

 also claims the advantage that his frames 

 are spaced ^4 inch wider in winter. But 

 couldn't L. frames have the same advan- 

 tage? and haven't they had it? One of his 

 claims, however, deserves consideration : 

 The greater depth, and so the more stores 

 above the brood-nest. He seems more sure 

 than ever that Editor Root is off in think- 

 ing that the size or shape of frame has 

 nothing to do with winter losses, and thinks 

 we should open our eyes to the need of a 

 deeper frame. However that may be, 

 friend Simmins, I happen to know of one 

 apiary where last winter's losses were ex- 

 ceptionally heavy, and the frames were 

 deeper than yours. [As we have before 

 said, if Mr. Simmins were more familiar 

 with our diversified climatic conditions he 

 would probably conclude that the size and 

 shape of the frame is not so material as 

 he seems to believe. The climate of Great 

 Britain is very much milder than that in 

 most localities in our northern States; and 

 the conditions in a mild climate, or one 

 comparatively so, should not be used as a 

 basis for an opinion for other localities 

 where conditions are very different. For 

 Mr. Simmins' benefit we may state that, 

 during the past severe winter (the most 

 severe, probably, that beekeepers here have 

 ever known), the losses were just as severe 

 on one class of frames as any other. For 

 years we followed this proposition, and 

 we, like all others in the United States, 

 have come to the conclusion that the size 

 nnd shape of a frame do not have very 

 tiiuch to do with success or failure in win- 

 tering. — Ed.] 



