1902 



THE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER 



149 



"If you have a colony with lots of 

 drones, or a quantity of drone brood 

 on hand, please express me a nucleus 

 colony at once as I have no drones 

 in the yard, owing to the bad weath- 

 er." Thus wrote a prominent queen 

 breeder recently to a friend who 

 know absolutely nothing about the 

 stock in his yards, farther than 

 that they are bees- The bees in his 

 charge are entirely made up of pick- 

 up, hit-and-miss stock from a dozen 

 small apiaries. If such carelessness 

 were shown generally in the breeding 

 of queens for the market, there would 

 be little wonder that complaints and 

 disappointment should so frequently 

 come to those who order from and 

 depend upon the extensive advertisers 

 to maintain the quality of their stock. 

 If, on account of adverse conditions, a 

 breeder finds it impossible to provide 

 himself with a supply of drones the 

 superiority of which he has demon- 

 strated, it would appear more honor- 

 able to cancel his advertising for the 

 season, and await the advent of more 

 favorable conditions. A breeder who 

 seeks nothing farther than yellow 

 bands of a satisfactory number in the 

 selection of his breeding drones is ob- 

 viously w^orking a permanent injury 

 to the commercial queen rearing in- 

 dustry. The day and age for "any old 

 thing" in the way of drones, we had 

 supposed long since passed. However, 

 it is morally certain that "the coming 

 bee.'' of which we used to hear so 

 much, will never be developed by such 

 careless methods; and it is equally 

 certain that if a patron of such a breed- 

 er should get value received, he has to 

 thank his lucky star, and not the skill 

 or fidelity or the one upon whom he 

 depends for superior stock. 



OVERSTOCKING — "PAT" THE 

 NEW STAR. 

 For convenience sake we take the 



liberty to coin a name for the gentle- 

 man who came all the way from 

 Asiatic Europe to revolutionize api- 

 cultural methods in the western hemi- 

 sphere, to whom we have referred in 

 recent issues- "Pat" is more convenient 

 than "the gentleman," and as we offer 

 it, not a whit less respectful. 



At Pat's urgent request, TTie Bee- 

 Keeper man recently visited his apia- 

 ries in order to give him the opportun- 

 ity to demonstrate the foolishness of 

 our claim' that he had overstocked tHe 

 range. Pat took great satisfaction in 

 exhibiting the greater quantity of hon- 

 ey found in the hives in the locality 

 having the larger number of colonies. 

 As a matter of fact, the extraordinary 

 spirt of nectar from the mangrove 

 bloom has made overstockingwell nigh 

 impossible at this time; so that in a 

 range in which over 300 colonies are 

 foraging the showing of honey in the 

 hives is fully equal, if not better than 

 another one a mile and a half distant, in 

 which there are but 200. Possibly, dis- 

 advantages of wind, condition of colon- 

 ies, characteristics of the stock, inac- 

 cessibility of flora, etc-, may be respon- 

 sible for a possible lack in the showing 

 of the smaller force as against that of 

 the larger. In any event, it is improb- 

 able that any superior showing of the 

 bees in the more crow^ded range, might 

 be justly attributed to the fact that a 

 greater number of colonies are kept 

 there. 



Pat says Mclntyre, of California, 

 wath six hundred colonies in a yard, 

 got an average per colony of 17a 

 pounds of Honey, while smaller apiaries 

 all around his starved to death. Says he, 

 "If a locality will support one colony, 

 it will in all probability as well sup- 

 port 100 colonies. The fact is, the nec- 

 tar comes into the flowers for only a 

 short time, and if the bees are not 

 there to gather it at once, it is lost by 



