240 



THE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER. 



[November, 



good results. Again he raises a lot of 

 queens from the original queen and 

 mates them to drones from the last 

 previous lot of queens, and so on as 

 long as the original queen lives. By- 

 destroying all queens whose offspring 

 shovi^ variation from his ideal type he 

 is steadily increasing the strength of 

 that type as regards its power to repro- 

 duce itself. When the old queen dies 

 he selects from the next to the last 

 generation a new queen for a queen- 

 mother and mates her offspring to 

 drones from the generation following 

 hers. With such breeding goes hand 

 in hand a careful and constant watch- 

 fulness, alert always for tendencies 

 either upward or downward, saving 

 one, destroying the other. He illus- 

 trated his points and backed up his ar- 

 guments by an almost bewildering ar- 

 ray of facts. He said that with con- 

 trolled mating it would be necessary 

 to use but one drone mother and that 

 progress would be more rapid but that 

 where_ mating was permitted in the 

 open it was often best to use several 

 queens for drone rearing so as to have 

 a vast host of drones of the desired 

 blood and thus lessen the chances of 

 mismating. 



Mr. Latham, in speaking of "Farmer 

 Bee-Keepers, their Needs and their 

 Troubles," condemned in no measured 

 terms, the urging of their adopting 

 frame hives, as is so persistently done 

 by the supply interests and by well 

 meaning but unthinking persons. He 

 said that in his travels he found many 

 farmers who had for years kept bees 

 in box hives, doing so to the direct ad- 

 vantage of their table and their fruit, 

 but having been persuaded that the 

 frame hive was the thing, bought them, 

 put bees in them, left them to them- 

 selves as they had always done and in 

 a shorter or longer time lost them all. 

 The box hives could be safely thus left 

 for the bees could readily make them 

 draft-proof and it mattered not whether 

 they occasionally got upset or tilted 

 over. But when the modern hive was 

 used as the farmer almost invariably 

 uses them, they spelt ruin to the upset 

 colony, which upset was often not dis- 

 covered for weeks, and in their un- 

 painted and neglected condition they 

 soon became a thing of more c acks 

 and holes than of solid surface. He did 

 not fear the competition of the honey 

 from the farmer with box hives, and 



the farmer who produced honey for 

 market in the modern way was a rare 

 fellow. When questioned as to how to 

 discover disease in bees in box hive 

 he said he tipped the hive over, turned 

 back the bottom, which is hinged on, 

 and with a knife cut a V-shaped piece 

 from the bottom of a comb with brood. 

 If all was right this piece was pushed 

 firmly into place, the bottom closed 

 and the hive set upright. 



He was strongly sustained by many 

 present both as regards the farmers 

 and in condemning the propaganda 

 carried on by the supply men urging 

 everyone to keep bees, branding it as 

 harmful to those now engaged in honey 

 production and misleading and hurtful 

 to most who are induced to enter the 

 pursuit. 



Mr. Herbert Cary, in his talks on 

 queen rearing, told of how they kept 

 certain colonies at queen rearing all 

 through the season. It was briefly 

 in using part of the colony for cell 

 building while the other part was rear- 

 ing and caring for brood. When one 

 batch of cells was finished the cell 

 builders were given the brood and 

 queen, and the other half of the colony 

 set at cell building. He roundly con- 

 demned the hatching of queens in 

 cages and subjecting them to a diet of 

 candy. He said that it was their ex- 

 perience that queens thus treated wer- 

 never as good as those having their im- 

 mediate freedom on combs. 



Dr. Wm. P. Brooks, director of the 

 Agricultural College at Amherst, 

 Mass., told of means for increasing or 

 improving the pasturage for bees at 

 once both feasible and successful. 

 Being quite in keeping with the aims 

 and efforts of farmers whether they 

 are bee-keepers or not, and being of 

 special interest to dairymen and poul- 

 try raisers it received cai'eful consider- 

 ation and hearty praise. In old fields, 

 which had not been plowed for over 

 twenty years experiments were con- 

 ducted to ascertain what might be 

 done towards making such profitable 

 for hay or pasturage without the ex- 

 pense in labor and time incident to the 

 customary method of plowing, cultivat- 

 ing and reseeding. The treatment 

 which he endorsed and which is of such 

 promise to bee-keepers was to top 

 dress the fields with 500 pounds of 

 basic slag meal and 150 pounds of high 

 grade sulphate of potash per acre. 



