46 



THE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER 



March 



honey, while the bands of others were 

 so wide as to almost blend into one. It 

 was getting late in the season for rear- 

 ing queens, but a few colonies needed 

 re-queening and 1 prepared a lot of cells 

 and grafted them from my Arkansas 

 queen. To my great surprise this lot of 

 queens were very uniform, and were all 

 very fine. Not one was mismated and 

 their workers showed up much more 

 uniform than those from the breeder. 

 The next season gave me a chance to give 

 her a thorough test, and I found that 

 she excelled anything 1 had tried as a 

 breeder. But there was one peculiarity 

 about her royal offspring : I could not 

 get a single breeder from the entire lot. 

 Hardly one of them but what showed 

 up better bees than she did, yet every 

 queen I reared from any of them would 

 show a large per cent, of black bees. 

 Now why did the granddaughters show 

 the black blood while the daughters 

 showed brighter and more uniform 

 workers than she did ? This is a 

 problem in heredity that I cannot solve. 

 I will explain that they were all mated 

 in the same apiary and under same 

 conditions. 



One day while busy in tlie apiary a 

 neighbor appeared on the scene and 

 asked me to go and hive a swarm. 

 "They had settled,'' he said, "on a black 

 gum, out on a limb about twenty feet 

 from the ground."' We took a hive along 

 and after a mile's walk reached the 

 place where the bees had settled. They 

 were what he called " blacks, " so I put 

 on a veil and "fixed up." I went up 

 after the bees, removed them from the 

 limb and let them down to the old gentle- 

 man. To my surprise I did not see a 

 mad bee. I descended from the tree and 

 went to help "get the bees in" and 

 soon learned that a veil was worse than 

 useless. The bees were very large and 

 uncommonly gentle. They were uni- 

 form brown, and wlien tilled witli lioiiey 

 iini\ tli(! abdomen curved, there was a 

 l)right yellow spot visible on the tirst 

 division. These bees proved U) he the 



equal of any in our neighborhood — 

 extra good comb builders and the queen 

 very prolific. I have seen others since, 

 just like her, and 1 pronounce them 

 \n\vi-. (German. If I find another of the 

 same kind I am going to establish an 

 apiary of them, as I consider them of 

 exceptional value. Of course, our de- 

 generate blacks are not worth the space 

 they occupy, but bees like those were are 

 worth caring for. One very desirable 

 trait is that they cap their honey so 

 white. 



So ends my musings on "Queens I 

 Have Known." I don't feel that I can 

 do justice to a few queens I have heard 

 of or read about or I might promise a 

 few lines. "Sufiticient unto the day is 

 the evil thereof," consequently I will 

 " act as the spirit moves me.'" 



Beeville. Tenn. 



AN ARTIFICIAL INCREASE 

 EPISODE. 



MY G. C. GKEINEK. 



THE honey season of a year ago was 

 one long to be remembered. It 

 was the poorest, most destitute of 

 honey, from beginning to end, that I 

 ever experienced. There was nothing to 

 do for the apiarist but to wait, and this 

 continuous waiting grew so monotonous 

 that I longed for something to do in the 

 line of bee-keeping. I had about a dozen 

 colonies to transfer which I intended to 

 do whenever bees could find honey 

 enough away from home to keep them 

 from robbing. 



During the time we generally have oni* 

 basswood honey-flow, bees did find a 

 little honey, and I imagined tlu" usual 

 flow from that source had begun. This 

 led me to think that my chance for that 

 littl(> frausferring job had come and start- 

 ed iu with what I considered one of my 

 strdugest colonies. I found, to my sur- 

 prise, not only a strong colony but a liive 

 full of brood also, so that 1 could (ill 

 eight of my frames, mostly all brood. 

 As I felt anxious to increase all I could, 



