TIIE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



165 



and were able to lay up some stores of honey — 

 though not to the extent thai one might be led 

 to suppose by the article in the Democrat. But 

 the bees that' did this were old bees. They soon 

 died of old age, and there being no young ones 

 ((lining on to till their places, the stocks became 

 so weak that they perished and left the hives 

 desolate. 



1 am confirmed in this opinion from the fact 

 that 1 fed my bees to promote breeding, when- 

 ever they were not getting honey from the 

 fltv'ds, and have sustained no such loss. Out of 

 seventy-five or eighty stocks that I carried 

 through the summer, 1 have lost only two, and 

 they died from dysentery — which I attribute to 

 feeding them with some poor honey that had 

 begun to ferment. 



I could give some other facts, tending to sup- 

 port the view which I have presented, hut fear 

 I shall make this communication too long 



D. BURBANK. 



Lexington, Ky., January 14, 18C9. 



[For the American Beo Journal.] 



What I Will Do. 



[For the American Bee Journal.] 



The Bee Disease. 



I will give fifty dollars for a stock of I'alian 

 bees — the progeny of a pure queen that mated 

 Avith a drone produced by a pure queen that 

 mated with a common drone — in which every 

 bee. native there, has three yellow bands. 



On the other hand, I will give fifty dollars 

 for a stock of Italian' bees — the progeny of a 

 pure queen that mated with a drone produced 

 by a pure queen that mated with a pure drone — 

 in which there can be found a single bee, native 

 there, has not three yellow bands. 



In other words, I would say that a pure queen 

 mating with a common drone will never produce 

 drones entirely pure — they will have a dash of 

 black blood; and a queen mating with such 

 drones, I care not how pure she may be, will 

 never produce a progeny of three-banded bees. 

 S< line will have three bands, while some will 

 have orly two, and some only one. Every bee, 

 however, will be marked with one, two, or three 

 bands. There will be none entirely black, as 

 in a hybred stock. On the other hand, a pure 

 queen mating with a drone produced by a pure 

 queen that mated with a pure drone, will 

 aim ays produce three-banded bees. 



Gentlemen bee-keepers, these are facts ; make 

 out of them what you like. 



J. H. Thomas. 



Brooklin, Ontario. 



Distributed over the wide pastures of the 

 Ukraice, every peasant has his store of hives, 

 which frequently, in their harvests, realize more 

 largely than their crops of grain — multitudes of 

 that peasantry computing as important items in 

 the estimate of their wealth, the number of 

 their bee hives, which often exceed five hundred 

 to the individual possessor. 



Bees make their hives in all the crevices of 

 rocks in Hedscha, findmg everywhere aromatic 

 plants and flowers. At Taif, "bees yield most 

 excellent honey, and the honey at Mecca is 

 exo.u : si'-e. 



Mr. Editor :— "That bee disease" has swept 

 over this part of the country, and destroyed 

 nearly all the bees. I had fifteen stands of the 

 black bee. They commenced dying oft' very 

 rapidly. I became satisfied that it, was the fault 

 of their food ; although my Italians did not ap- 

 pear to be affected by the disease at all, and in 

 two "old" stands of black bees in Brazier pat- 

 ent hives, which contained much stores from 

 the season before in the large brooding cham- 

 ber, there were only about one-fourth as many 

 dead bees as in the rest. I noticed also that 

 young stocks, which had all new stores, died 

 much faster than old ones that had some old 

 stores remaining. 



I watched the movements of mine till ten of 

 the fifteen stands were dead, and three of the 

 remaining five were nearly so — some of them 

 reduced to not more than a quart of bees in a 

 hive. I commenced with these, and removed 

 all their storts that I could, and fed them with 

 a feed made of crushed sugar dissolved, adding 

 one pint of West India honey to each half gal- 

 lon of dissolved sugar, and boiling down to Ihe 

 consistence of honey, skimming it well as it 

 boiled. Thus I fed them all the time, kept 

 plenty of rye flour constantly by them, and put 

 a handful of salt in each hive. 



The result was that they stopped dying ; and 

 my weak stands survived, with not more than 

 a quart of bees in a stand. But they appear to 

 be in a healthy condition, and some of them 

 have commenced to rear brood— stimulated, 

 probably, by the feed. 



This is my experience with "that bee di- 

 sease." There was none of my stocks that 

 died but had plenty of honey and pollen left ; 

 and that was the case also with most of those 

 that died within my knowledge. I give this 

 for what it is worth. 



I do not pretend to say that the gait had any- 

 thing to do with the arrest of the disease, 

 though I think it may have had. The bees ap- 

 peared to be fond of it when first put in. 



I find on examining my Italians to-day that 

 there are some more dead bees under each 

 stand than is usual at this time of year. It may 

 be that they are taking the same disease. I 

 have not fed them any as yet. 



B. Puckett. 



Winchester, Ind. 



Wild bees are sometimes exceedingly pleas- 

 ant to capture, for many of them emit the most 

 agreeable scents ; some the pungent and re- 

 freshing fragrance of lemons ; others the rich 

 odor of the sweet-scented rose; and some a pow r - 

 erful perfume of balcumic fragrance and rig r- 

 ous intensity. These, however, have their set- 

 off in others which yield a most offensive smell, 

 in comparison with which that of garlic is 

 pleasant, and assafaetida a nosegay. These 

 odors must have Sv. me pu r pose in their econo- 

 my, but what it may be has not been ascertain- 

 ed. — Shuckard. 



