1870.] 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



119 



[ForTho American Bee Journal.] 



How May Progress be Taught ? 



Mr. Editor : — As the columns of the Bee 

 Journal are made the medium of disseminating 

 apicultural knowledge, by asking and answering 

 questions, I have this question to ask in refer- 

 ence to the class of bee-keepers who use box 

 and gum exclusively. How shall we reach 

 these, and dispense the necessary knowledge 

 among them ? Let us endeavor to devise some 

 effective means. Your Journal is doing the 

 work as far as they can be induced to take and 

 study it ; but the number is comparatively limi- 

 ted. Many of these people, when they see an 

 improved bee-hive, unconsciously exclaim to the 

 owner, who happens to be a practical bee- 



"Mr." B.— What do you call that?" 



B. "That, sir, is a bee-hive." 



Q. "What do you have so many sticks in it 

 for?" 



B. "Those are what we call frames for the 

 bees to build their combs on ; each frame sepa- 

 rately giving theni the means by which the combs 

 may be removed from the hive, for the purjiose 

 of making artificial swarms, furnishing honey 

 from the rich to the poor colonies and strength- 

 ening weak ones." 



Here the querist exclaims in perfect amaze- 

 ment : " What will the bees be doing while you 

 are lifting their combs out?" 



B. " If you treat the bees right they will not 

 harm you ; besides we can have "^ protection, 

 made of wire cloth, or what is more handy, a 

 piece of bobbinet to place over the face ; and by 

 keeping the hands wet, the bees will not sting, 

 unless they are badly treated." 



Q. "What a fool I have been. I have kept 

 bees all my life, and never before knew what I 

 needed. I sujipose if you can lift out the combs, 

 as you say you can, you could find the king's 

 house and perhaps the king himself?" 



B. " There is no such bee in the hive." 



Q. " What ! no king bee ! Why I always un- 

 derstood that a colony of bees without a king 

 and ruler, whose mandates are strictly obeyed, 

 will not be worth anything." 



B. "The bee you allude to is the mother of 

 the colony and is called the queen ; but she has 

 no house or particular spot in the hive in which 

 she dwells. The woiker-bees, however, con- 

 struct what are called queen-cells, in which 

 queens are reared ; but they never remain in 

 them, except only while in embryo." 



Q. " Why, Mr. B., you seem to know as much 

 about bees as the man I heard a neighbor speak 

 of. He said there was a man living in Iowa that 

 reared king bees {perhaps you would call them 

 queen bees) of a superior and different kind from 

 the common bee, and brought from some other 

 country." 



B. " Yes, we rear our own queens, or in other 

 words we cause the bees to do so, by our artifi- 

 cial process. This we do for the purpose of 

 furnishing fertilized qireens to old stocks, when 

 their queens are taken away, as is the case in 

 producing artificial swarms." 



Q. "Then you can make bees swarm, and rear 

 queens at your will?" 



B. "Yes." 



Q. " But do you never find a hive that is not 

 in the notion of swarming? I always thought 

 that bees knew when they wanted to swarm, 

 better than man did." 



B. " Bees have only instinct, and were not in- 

 tended in the beginning to produce their own 

 swarms. They were created for the benefit of 

 man, and if that had been the way swarms were 

 intended to be made, they would be made in 

 conformity with natural laws that govern them, 

 and swarming would always be successfully per- 

 formed in perfection. Man was given knowl- 

 edge, by means of which it was intended he 

 should manage his bees in his own way, inde- 

 pendent of any will they may have. The i^enalty 

 for man's neglect in this respect is the loss of his 

 bees in various ways — such as swarming and 

 departing to parts unknown, loss of queen, ex- 

 termination by robbing, &c. Man, therefore, 

 endowed with knowledge and judgment, knows 

 more of the management, for his benefit, of the 

 internal parts of the hive, than the bees, with 

 mere instinct, can possibly know." 



Q. "I perceive, sir, that these are the days of 

 our ignorance spoken of in Holy Writ, though 

 I was never able to see it till now. Some of my 

 neighbors, a few years ago, purchased bees wliicli 

 were in common boxes and gums. They brought 

 them hume and set them down in a remote cor- 

 ner of the yard or garden, to live or die, as they 

 might or could, with no attention whatever, ex- 

 cept when the time came to secure some of their 

 delicious stores, which, with shame I confess, is 

 the practice in all the neighborhood now." 



B. "Your statement is only too true, if in- 

 deed the facts are not wor.se." 



This is a fair specimen of the questions asked 

 by common bee-keepers. 



While the inventive genius of the age has 

 given power to water in the form of steam, 

 causing the face of the earth to be alive with 

 machinery and wheels that are almost daily cir- 

 cumscribing its surface at lightning speed — yea, 

 the lightning itself has, as it were, been snatched 

 from the heavens and made to do the bidding of 

 man — yet the bee-hive, till within the last fifteen 

 years, has in a measure remained as it may have 

 been in the garden of Eden. The invention of 

 the frames was the dawn of a new era in bee- 

 keeping, by means of which we have advanced 

 step by step up the hill of science to the present 

 advanced stage, while progression still looms up 

 and fades away in the distance. The mysteries 

 of the hive that remained hidden from the be- 

 ginning till now, are, many of them, solved and 

 being solved, and all the various causes of the 

 destruction of colonies plainly disclosed. The 

 practical man, properly informing himself, need 

 not lose a hive ; while, in the old way, twenty- 

 five per cent, of all the bees kei^t in the country 

 are lost every year. While we have reached 

 these advances, there are many things yet in 

 embryo, that will be reached by and by — such 

 as the control of fertilization, which enables the 

 bee-keeper to select both queens and drones, and 

 secure the purity of the race we prefer to cuiti- 



