228 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL AND GAZETTE. 



[For the Bee Journal and Gazette. J 



Piiriiy of Italian Bees. 



Eeading an article on this subject in No. 1 of 

 the .second volume of the Bee Journal, page 

 17, I came to the conclirsion that the Italian 

 queens I ordered and purchased from Mr. L. L. 

 Langstrot»i were what Mr. Kleine terms bas- 

 tardized, because none of them raised young 

 queens perfectly equal in color to their mother. 

 And who would not have come to the same 

 conclusion ? I vras still more convinced of the 

 correctness of my ©pinion, when I read an ar- 

 ticle of Mrs E. S. Tupper, in the Cliicago 

 Prairie Farmer, in which she says, "/ cannot 

 consider a?t Itolia-n queen pure whoae royal 

 d'tvghters are not duplicates of herxelf.'''' Of 

 course tlii.s }ed me to the o^pinion that Mr. 

 Kleine'.e and Mre. TiTi^per's queens were of this 

 descriptioa. Having occasion to go to Chicago 

 on other business,. I concluded to visit Mrs. 

 Tupper, but on arriving at her premises, found 

 that she had gone to the State Fair at Burling-' 

 ton. On examicjing some of her stocks, I soon 

 became satisfied that her Italian bees did not dif- 

 fer from those I had raised from the Langstroth 

 queens. Meeting this learned and interesting 

 lady afterwards at Burlington, in a short con- 

 versation aboiTt luHan qi>eens she made the 

 remark that we must be satisfied if we get a 

 majority o-f handsome young queens from a 

 pure mother. Hence I concluded I could not 

 get what I wanted, a queen absolutely pure ac- 

 cording to Mr. Kleine's description. Wow I 

 cannot conceive why Mr. Kleine wrote the in- 

 teresting letter already referred to, nor why 

 Mrs. Tup}>er detines^he purity &t' Italian queen's 

 as she does,, when both of them should have 

 known that they had no such queens them- 

 selves, and co-uld not procure any such any- 

 where, not even in Italy. Nor can I explain 

 this satisfactorily to my mind, even after read- 

 ing Mr. Kleine's letter on color as a test of 

 puritj- in Italian, bees, publislied in the Bee 

 Journal, vol. 2,. No. 6, page 119. Who can re- 

 concile Mr, Kleine's letters, or Mrs. Tupper's 

 definitions? Undoubtedly Mr. Kleine would 

 stand a great deal higher with the breeders of 

 Italian bees kad he never written his first pub- 

 lished letter, as far as queens and drones are 

 concerned. And Mrs. Tupper would probably 

 have saved herself many cxi)lanalions and dis- 

 satisfactions, if among the young queens ob- 

 tained fron\ her there be such ''whose ?oyal 

 daughters are not duplicates of themselves." 



I obtained and stdl have three queens of Mr. 

 Langstroth, and have raised about six hundred 

 fertile young qm;eus myself. Yet none of all of 

 them was or is so^ pure that their young queens 

 d d not greatly vary in color, while all their 

 workt^rs are purely maiked with three distinct 

 stripes. From an almost black Italian- queen, 

 which I tested for bleeding, I raised three splen- 

 did yellow ones, eciual to any in my apiary. 



Adam Giumm. 



jEPPEr.soNr Wis.^ March, 1807. 



[SIS'* It is now conceded that proof of the 

 pure fertilization of tin Italian queen, and 

 consequently of her absolute purity,, is to be ' 

 looked for only in the marking and deportment 

 of her worker progeny.] 



Bees Fertil-zing Flowers. 



I am tempted to give one more instance 

 showing how plants and animals, most remote 

 in the scale of nature, are bound together by a 

 web of complex relations The exotic Lobeli? 

 fulgens, in this part of England, is never visita- 

 by irrsects, and consequently from its peculiar 

 structure, can never set a seed. Many of our 

 orchidaceous plants absolutely require the visit.'j 

 of moths to remove their pollen masses and 

 thus to fertilize them. I find from experiments 

 that humble-bees are almost indispensable to 

 the fertilization of the hearts-ease (vi'o^a tri- 

 color), for other bees do not visit this fiowers' 

 I have also found that the visits of bees are 

 necessary for the fertilizalSioTi of some kinds of 

 clover. Thus, for instance, twenty heads of 

 Dutch clover {trifolium repens) yielded 2,290 

 seeds ; twenty other heads protected from bees 

 produced not ane. Again, a liiis-ndred heads of 

 Ted c]over (fi-ifolium j)refen»e) prodttced 2,700 

 seeds, but the same number of protected heads- 

 produced not a single seed. Humble-bees alone 

 visit red clover, as other bees cannot reach 

 the Bcctar. It has been suggested that moths- 

 may servQ to fertilize the clovers ; but I doubt 

 this in the case of the red clover, from their 

 weight being apparently not sufficient to de- 

 press the wing-petals. Hence we may infer as- 

 highly probable, that if the whole genus of 

 humble-bees became extinct or very rare in En- 

 gland, the hearts-ease and red clover would be- 

 come very rare or wholly disappear. Ther 

 number of humble-bees is any district depends 

 in a gre;it degree on the number of field-mice, 

 which destroy their combs >'nd nests ; and Mr. 

 H. Newman, wha has long attend( d to the 

 hnbits of humble-bees, believes thit "more thau 

 two-thirds of.them are thus destroyed all over 

 England." Now the number of mice is largely 

 cfependent, as every one knows, on the number 

 of cats ; and Mr. Newman says, "Near vilLigcs 

 and small towns I have found the nests of hum- 

 ble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which 

 I attribute to the number of cats which destroy 

 the mice." Hence it is quite credible that the 

 presence of feiice arrimais in large numbers in 

 a district might determine, through the ioter- 

 vention first of mice and then of bees, the fre- 

 quency of certain fiowers in that district. 



Darwin. 



Bees in South Africa. 



Livingstone says : Bee-cultiwe is prosecuted 

 in Londa, and hives are found there placed on 

 trees in the desert forests We frequently 

 met with wagons freighted among other com- 

 modities with lumps of wax weighing front 

 eighty to a hnndred pounds ; and it was oflered 

 to us "for siUe in nearly every village But here 

 (in Zambesi, south latitude 16^)' we did not see 

 a single hive, though bees were found eveiy- 

 Avhere in the hollow Mopane trees. In many 

 part* of the Batoka countiy bees are abundant, 

 and the tribute due to Skeletu is usually paid iu 

 large vessels of honey. We saw a small quan- 

 tity of wax also in Kilimane, gathered by the 

 natives of that district. 



Missionary Travels^ 1857. 



