! 1903 



THE AMEJnCAN BEE-KEEPER 



223 



male is a necessary evil, or, rather, an 

 evil necessity. He is hatched from an 

 inferior egg, lives through a neglected 

 infancy, reaches a despised maturity, 

 has his little day and is promptly 

 pushed oflf the boards; in other words 

 is hastily dispatched by a disdainful and 

 all-powerful femininity. To this rule 

 he has no choice but to submit, since 

 he is provided by nature with no weap- 

 on of self defense in the shape of a 

 sting, and hardly any tongue, though 

 this perhaps would avail him little 

 against so strong a feminine majority. 

 Under this despotic feminine sway the 

 kingdom is ruled both well and wisely, 

 so perfectly indeed that a colony of 

 bees has always been held up as a mod- 

 el of good government. The woman 

 who would prove the justice of her 

 claim to a voice in the affairs of the 

 nation has her enemies on the hip if 

 she has a bee-hive in good working or- 

 der, it is an irrefutable argument on 

 her side of the question. But while a 

 woman would scarcely become a Ijee- 

 keeper for the sake of proving an ar- 

 gument, she might well do it for the 

 sake of the pleasure, aside from all 

 thought of the very considerable profit 

 which the occupation yields. 



In the bee kingdom everything is 

 subservient to the making of honey. It 

 is with this ultimate end in view that 

 the queen, when six or eight days old, 

 soars out of the hive on her wedding 

 flight. With this end in view she re- 

 turns to spend the rest of her natural 

 life in laying (during the laying season 

 which lasts from early spring to late 

 falli eggs at the rate of two and three 

 a minute. As she lives for three or 

 four years, she thus produces in the 

 course of her life time something like 

 a million eggs, which should certainly 

 enable her to feel, on her death-bed, 

 that her time had not been wasted. Al- 

 ways with the idea of the production of 

 honey uppermost in her mind she lays 

 but few eggs from which drones will 



be produced (these eggs are of a par- 

 ticular kind which by an all-wise prov- 

 idence, she can produce at will), but de- 

 votes most of her energies to the lay- 

 ing of eggs from which in the course 

 of about twenty-one days worker bees 

 will come forth. The same kind of 

 egg is capable of producing either a 

 worker or a queen, according to the 

 manner in which it is fed. 



The power of decision as to whether 

 an egg shall be developed into the one 

 or the other rests not with the queen- 

 mother, but with the worker bees, who 

 thus not only control the present, but 

 arrange the future as well. 



How much honey a colony of bees 

 is capable of producing in a season de- 

 pends greatly on the prolificness of the 

 (jueen. and on the abundance of nec- 

 tar-yielding flowers within a radius of 

 two or three miles. 



Englewood^ N. J. 



'Tis with our judgments as with our watches; 



none 

 Are just alike, yet each believes his own. 



— Pope. 



Bee Pasture. 



(By L. E. Kerr.) 



VERY often we see the question 

 asked: "Is there any plant 

 that will pay to grow for hon- 

 ey alone?" Whether such a plant ex- 

 ists I will not try to say, but I do wish 

 to say that this question sounds a lit- 

 tle foolish, for who would wish to culti- 

 vate a plant that furnished only nectar, 

 while there are so many nectar-yield- 

 ing ones, which furnish also excellent 

 crops of fruit and grain. I am of the 

 opinion that new plants for supplying 

 nectar, are not half so desirable as 

 would be giving attention more to 

 some of our present field crops and 

 study to have them coming on at the 

 proper time to fill up the vacancies be- 

 tween the main flows from the natural 

 sources. 



I also incline to the belief that long- 



