474 



A Stray Swarm.— There are few bees 

 in this neighborhood ; poor season for 

 honey till fall bloom began, bnt since 

 then it has been plenty. I bought 2 col- 

 onies of Italians last spring, and have 

 increased to 5 artificially ; lost 1 ; when 

 the fall bloom began in the latter part 

 of August, the bees all made prepara- 

 tions for swarming, and one swarm was 

 a little too smart for me and left for 

 elsewhere. One of my Italian nuclei 

 which I was building up, has apparently 

 given shelter to a swarm of wild blacks, 

 as there are thousands of pure blacks in 

 the hive ; in fact, they completely out- 

 number the Italians. The queen I 

 reared myself; she is tine-looking and 



Erolific. I have been unable to find any 

 lack queen, and am just introducing 

 into the colony an imported Italian 

 queen, so as to have no question as to 

 parentage. Is not my theory of the in- 

 trusion of the blacks probably correct; 

 if not, what is the explanation ? 



Fred. C. Bowditch. 

 Brookline, Mass., Sept. 18, 1880. 



[It is an unusual freak, but one which 

 sometimes happens. A similar one oc- 

 curred lately in the Bee Journal 

 apiary. It was probably an after-swarm , 

 and its queen was killed in the melee 

 upon entering the nucleus. — Ed.] 



Eggs that would not Hatch.— I send 

 you with this letter the corpse of a queen 

 which I had calculated to send alive, 

 but she died before I was ready to send 

 her. This queen was reared in a neigh- 

 boring apiary, and never laid an egg that 

 hatched into the larval state during an 

 existence of 3 months. She laid in this 

 time 1.000 eggs, but they dried and 

 shriveled up, and she would lay repeat- 

 edly in the same cell. We exchanged 

 her eggs to other hives with the same 

 result. Now, according to the best au- 

 thorities,these eggs should have hatched 

 whether fertilized or not. If you will 

 send her to Prof. Cook for dissection, I 

 think probably he can find some trouble 

 about the reproductive organs that will 

 account for this remarkable phenom- 

 enon. W>i. Hausmann. 



Ashford, Wis., Sept. 2, 1880. 



[This is another one of those curious 

 cases mentioned in my Manual of the 

 Apiary, p. 83. Such queens seem in 

 every way perfect, but there seems to 

 be a congenital defect with the ovaries. 

 The eggs continue to grow in these 

 organs^but are imperfect, and so fail to 

 develope. Such cases are found among 



all higher animals. The special defect 

 of the cells, for each egg is only a cell, 

 has not been determined. — A. J. Cook.} 



Fertile Worker, &c— Bees have not 

 done well here, this season. I lost a 

 number of colonies by spring dwind- 

 ling ; I now have 24 colonies ; they have 

 filled their hives, but have very little 

 surplus. The enclosed weed grows 

 here from 3 to 9 feet high ; the bees 

 gather a great deal of pollen from it ; it 

 is in bloom for two months or more. 

 What is its name? Do fertile work- 

 ers ever get into a hive where there is a 

 queen ? I had a colony that was % 

 drone brood and I thought I would kill 

 the queen and let them rear one. I 

 looked for her and found her ; when I 

 was looking I noticed more than one 

 egg in the drone cells but never thought 

 of fertile workers. I removed all of 

 their combs and gave them a frame of 

 larvae and two frames of honey from 

 another hive ; in two or three days I 

 looked for queen-cells, but instead, 

 found eggs, from 1 to 7 in a cell. I then 

 took another hive like theirs and put in 

 a frame of brood and bees, and two 

 more frames of honey and placed in 

 their hive, and carrying them across the 

 yard, put the frames and bees in with 

 another colony, and thought that I 

 should get rid of the egg layer, but did 

 not. When I looked for queen-cells I 

 found eggs the same as before. I then 

 united them with another colony and 

 did not have any hive for them to come 

 back to. J. C. Peters. 



Greenleaf, Minn., Sept. 10, 1880. 



[The queen, evidently, had become 

 worthless as a mother and hence the 

 presence of this pest to the apiarist— a 

 fertile worker.— Ed. J 



One Thing Lacking.— I have just been 

 reading in the Bee Journal, the re- 

 ports of the crop of honey, &c, from 

 different parts of the country, and 

 thought, while reading, that one point 

 of interest, at least to me, was omitted; 

 and that was the price of honey in the 

 home market of each person reporting. 

 I thought it would be equally interesting 

 to know the different prices all over the 

 country, as to know the other condi- 

 tions. I have been selling comb honey 

 readily at 20c. I produce extracted 

 honey only for my own use. The crop 

 of surplus honey here is quite light, 

 some of the largest bee-keepers have 

 no surplus at all ; while others have 

 very little. I had a fair yield from 18 

 colonies. White clover was a failure ; 

 basswood was good for a few days ; we 



