1872.] 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



23 



attention and study of some of the greatest 

 minds in all ages of its history, and no one has 

 ever failed to discover in its being and life 

 things marvellous and almost incredible to be- 

 lieve. But leaving the natural history of the 

 insect out of the question, it is proposed to 

 speak in this paper only of the practical part of 

 bee-culture. 



In a perfect hive of bees there are three kinds, 

 viz., "The queen," the mother of the whole 

 colony; "The worker," the producer of the 

 neuter gender, and "The drones," the male 

 bees who take up room in the hive but bring in 

 no honey. 



THE QUEEN 



is a fully developed female, while the workers 

 are females imperfectly developed. 



The queen is impregnated by copulating but 

 once with the drone while on the wing, high up 

 in the air, and in forty-six hours after her fecun- 

 dation all things being right, she begins to lay 

 eggs, and it is stated by those who profess to 

 know, that she is capable of laying 2000 eggs in 

 twenty-four hours. In the time of Huber, a 

 blind Swiss naturalist of great celebrity, it was 

 supposed that the ovaries of the queen contained 

 regular succession of the different kinds of eggs 

 necessary to produce the three kinds of bees we 

 find in a hive. He made an experiment which 

 proved to him that if the hive contained no 

 drone comb, the queen dropped her male eggs 

 at random and no males were reared, and so if 

 there was no worker comb, she dropped her 

 worker eggs anywhere and no workers were 

 produced. 



But it is now the received idea that the eggs 

 of the queen are all alike, and that it is only 

 the different kinds of cells in which they are I 

 laid, and the different kinds of food and treat- 

 ment they receive in their embryo state, that 

 make the three kinds of bees. All eggs deposited 

 by the queen in drone cells become drones, and 

 the same is true of the worker and the queen. 

 The queen has a sting which she only uses to 

 sting another queen. She lives four or rive years 

 if no accident happens to her, but in the after 

 part of her life, like an old hen, ceases to be 

 fertile. 



The instinct of the workers teaches, then, the 

 necessity of having a queen that will lay eggs 

 so as to keep their numbers good, and they pre- 

 pare to raise another queen to take her place. 

 This they do by budding a queen cell, and if, 

 when the cell is about half done, the queen 

 does not deposit an egg in it, they take an egg 

 from a worker cell and put it into it, and by 

 feeding the embryo queen with royal food, and, 

 perhaps by some other process oidy known to 

 themselves, the egg that would have been a 

 worker, if it had remained in a worker cell, be- 

 comes a queen. 



THE DRONE 



is the male bee and has no sting — no means of 

 gathering honey or secreting wax, or doing any 

 work necessary to their own support, or the 

 common good of the colony. Like some in hu- 

 man society, they are non-producers, and live 

 by others' toil and industry. 



THE WORKERS 



are imperfectly developed females, and they do 

 all the work that is done in the hive. They 

 secrete the wax, they build the comb, gather 

 the pollen for the young, and the honey for all, 

 feed and rear the brood, and fight all the battles 

 necessary to defend the colony against harm. 



THE ITALIAN BEE 



of late has been introduced into different parts 

 of this country and Europe, and much has been 

 said and written about their superiority in every 

 repect to our common black bee. It is claimed 

 that the queen is more prolific— that they can 

 gather honey from the second crop of red clover, 

 and from other flowers that the native bee does 

 not visit— that they are more hardy, less irasci- 

 ble and more easily managed. This variety of 

 bee was accidentally found in a small district in 

 the Alps of Switzerland and northern part of 

 Italy, by a captain in Napoleon's army. In 1855, 

 Messrs. Wagner & Jessop, of York', Pennsyl- 

 vania, made an unsuccessful attempt to intro- 

 duce this bee iiito the United States. In 1858 

 and 1859, another unsuccessful effort was made 

 by Messrs. Wagner, Coivin & Langstroth. 



Later in the same year,' seven living queens 

 weve received by the last named gentlemen, but 

 these all perished in the winter of 1860. About 

 the same time Mahan, of Pa., made importa- 

 tions, and subsequently in the same year (1860), 

 Parsons, of Long Island, received an importa- 

 tion of this kind of bee from the northern part 

 of Italy, and from these importations bees have 

 been distributed to the many apiarians through- 

 out the country. 



When it is once established that the Italian 

 is superior in the points claimed, the progressive 

 beekeeper very naturally desires to adopt them 

 in place of the black bee. But how can he do 

 it is the question? How can he substitute the 

 one for the other? 



To do this, the first requisite is to have the 

 movable comb hive. Without this, it would be 

 almost useless to Italianize a swarm of bees and 

 keep them so for any length of time. 



To Italianize a hive is to substitute a pure 

 Italian queen in place of the native queen, ' 

 and the workers and drones will soon be like 

 the mother. As the process of doing this is 

 so well described by Mrs. Tupper, I shall use 

 her words, as she has had experience in this 

 business. "The queen being the mother of the 

 whole colony, it follows if a pure Italian queen 

 be given them instead of their own, all the 

 bees reared after her introduction are Italian. 



TRANSFERRING 



bees from the box hive to the movable frame 

 hive is a very simple and at the same time very 

 important process. Capt. Hetherington, of 

 Cherry Valley, who probably keeps the largest 

 amount of bees of any one in the United States, 

 explained his process at the Beekeepers' Con- 

 vention in Utica, to be as follows : He takes the 

 hive intended to be transferred into a room with 

 the windows all darkened but one. The bees 

 are stopped into the hive and when removed 

 into this darkened room the hive is inverted 



