118 



AMERICAN BEE lOURNAL 



Feb. 20, 3902. 



at the pedigrees of noted trotting-horses." 



In anotlier article in Gleanings, he said : "The use of the 

 terms 'choice bred,' 'straight golden breeders,' "breeding- 

 queens,' etc., implies that the person claiming to have such stock- 

 has produced it according to the well-recognized laws of 

 breeding; that for many years the ancestry of this stock was 

 pure and potent, and that these 'breeders' will produce 

 oflfspring which, when properly mated, will maintain the 

 same traits as their parents, with virtually no variation. Just 

 how many queen-rearers care to affirm that for their stock?" 

 " "Thoroughbred' is not 'crossbred,' as any high-class stock- 

 raiser will testify. Thorough breeding is cautious, careful, 

 scientific in-breeding (do not confound this with in-and-in 

 breeding) ; and when alien blood is introduced the result 

 can never be foretold with certainty, the chances being 

 toward atavism, the reverting to a previous type." 



"It is high time we began to be scientific in our work. 

 The haphazard, guess-at-it rule-o' -thumb ways have pre- 

 vailed altogether too long. We shall injure ourselves, and be 

 held accountable by those who follow us, if, knowing, we 

 do not set about to overcome the evils." 



These e.xtracts indicate, in general, that those who rear 

 queens are ignorant of matters of great importance in breeding 

 queens. Let us now turn to the utterances of one of the 

 foremost queen-rt'ajvrj, and judge for ourselves whether he 

 and others do all they might in selecting the ancestors of 

 those queens which they are undoubtedly competent to rear. 

 Mr. G. M. Doolittle says in the American Bee Journal : 



"A yield of from 6o to 8o pounds of comb honey from 

 red clover this year, with little or nothing 20 years ago, 

 proves that I have not labored entirely in vain." In the 

 American Bee-Keeper he sets forth his ideas thus : "We 

 often hear bee-keepers say, 'If all the colonies had been as 

 good as was No. 12 (No. 45, or some other nurnber, as the 

 case may be), I should have had several hundred, if not 

 thousand, more pounds of honey than I secured this year.' 

 Well, the question is, why not have all the colonies in the 

 apiary as good as No. 12? We may not accomplish all 

 we would like to in one year, but by superseding all the 

 poorer queens in the apiary by those reared from No. 12, 

 we certainly shall be advancing our apiary up the scale 

 toward No. 12's yield. This is what I have been working 

 for during the past 30 years, and it gives me pleasure to 

 say that my colonies average very much more nearly alike 

 in their yields, and the average yield per colony is much 

 higher in proportion to the yield of nectar from the nectar- 

 bearing flora, than it was when I commenced." 



It is evident from this quotation that one who is an author- 

 ity on queen-rearing recommends no other principle than 

 that of breeding from the queen that did best in one partic- 

 ular year. He says nothing about the fact that a queen whose 

 own colony is good may be weak in the power to trans- 

 mit her excellence. That he has made progress by simply 

 going on the assumption that "like produces like" is pre- 

 cisely what we should expect ; for among the numerous best 

 queens in a long period of years, some, at least, would have 

 the power of transmitting their qualities with little loss. 

 But the question is. Would he not have done better still to 

 breed only from the potent queens than to breed from all 

 the freaks without discrimination? We must conclude, there- 

 fore, that Mr. Miller's reference to "haphazard, rule-o'- 

 thumb ways" of queen-rearers in selecting queens is justi- 

 fied, no matter how skillful they may be in the rearing itself. 

 Mr. Doolittle has, it is true, attempted to parry the criti" 

 cism of his neglect to select according to the laws of breed' 

 ing, by referring to the difficulty of mating with desired 

 drones. In this very important matter of selecting queens 

 whose progeny is uniform, that e.xcuse has very little force, 

 for queens can always be selected, even if we never could 

 select drones. The conclusion is unavoidable that, with all 

 the disadvantages connected with the choice of drones, our 

 queen-rearers have not applied the science of breeding as they 

 could have done. 



But let us consider just what this matter of difficulty in 

 selecting drones amounts to. On page 681 (1901) of the Amer- 

 ican Bee Journal Mr. Doolittle gives four plans for mating 

 queens with desired drones. Of one of his plans^that of 

 having his queen-mating nuclei in a locality isolated five 

 miles or more from all other bees — he remarks : "The queens 

 will, as a rule, be all mated with the desired drones." (Right 

 here I wish to say that there are plenty of locations in 

 Colorado and Utah that have the advantage of daily mails, 

 and I have no doubt also all over the West and South- 

 west, where we can be absolutely sure there are no out- 

 side drones, for the reason that fliere is nothing in the 



surrounding country to support bees.) Of another plan, 

 that of carrying the drone colony and the nuclei into the 

 cellar until after four o'clock, or- when other drones cease 

 to fly, feeding them a little warm diluled sweet just before 

 setting out, and setting them so as to face the western 

 sun, he remarks : "'Queens and drones will fly something 

 as they usually do in the early afternoon, and the results will 

 prove quite satisfactory." It seems, then, that when suffi- 

 cient labor and care are taken, queens can be mated with 

 drones from some particular queen ; and in one of the other 

 plans Mr. Doolittle hand-picks his drones, thus narrowing 

 the choice still further. There appears to be no reason 

 why this hand-picking process should not be applied to any 

 such plan. Now, this attention and labor may not be com- 

 mercially profitable on a large scale, when a man makes his 

 bread and butter from queen-rearing. I do not know about 

 that. But it is clear that we can select both sides in breed- 

 ing bees to almost as great a degree as in breeding Jersey 

 cattle or Leghorn chickens, the only differences being that 

 the queen herself does not gather honey as a cow gives milk, 

 and that we can judge somewhat more by the external appear- 

 ance of a bull than we can at present from the appearance 

 of a drone. But these are minor considerations, for ances- 

 try — of which we may be equally sure in bees and cattle if 

 we are willing to take the trouble — counts for more than 

 individual traits as a guarantee that those traits -will be 

 transmitted. And when the desired object is the establish- 

 ment of a new strain of stock a good deal of attention and 

 labor are required in any case. 



Mr. Adrian Getaz, in the American Bee Journal, lays 

 much stress on the fact that Nature has been thousands of 

 years developing hardiness and honey-gathering qualities, so 

 It is reasonable to suppose the limit has been nearly reached, 

 if not altogether. He says that those qualities in animals 

 which we have succeeded in improving were completely unde- 

 veloped in nature. The trouble with this statement is that 

 it isn't so. Even a Mexican wild hog has some value for 

 meat; and when we consider milk-producing qualities, which 

 are a pretty good parallel to honey-producing qualities ,we see 

 how fallacious the idea is. Nature has been developing milk- 

 producing qualities for millions of years, but nature never 

 would have developed a strain of cows every one of which 

 gives several times as much milk as the calf requires ; nor 

 does nature need to concern herself with producing bees 

 that will gather much more honey than suffices for winter 

 stores. Nature has done nothing whatever to test the full 

 capacity of bees for gathering honey. So it is with hardi- 

 ness. Both white and black men belong to the same species' 

 but nature has not made the black capable of resisting pul- 

 monary diseases, nor the white man capable of resisting 

 malarial fevers. But if each had developed in the other's 

 quarter of the globe, can we doubt the result, according to 

 the law of the survival of the fittest? The fallacy of the 

 idea consists in assuming that nature's tests are always the 

 most complete possible. They are not; they are of all 

 degrees. 



We have, therefore, no sound reasons for believing that 

 the breeding of bees, and their possible improvement, pre- 

 sent such insuperable difficulties as to differentiate them from 

 all other stock. But what about the science of breeding in 

 general? Is it easy or hard, slow or fast? On this point 

 Mr. C. P. Dadant says in the American Bee Journal : "Those 

 who have persistently worked for years — for a lifetime — to 

 secure the change desired in breeds of horses, pigs, cows, 

 chickens, and, in fact, in the improvement of any domestic 

 animals, or plants, or trees, those men know how little 

 can be accomplished in a single man's life. . . . But never- 

 theless it would be wrong to discourage those who try, for 

 they are certainly on the right road. . . . That we can 

 succeed, sooner or later, is evident, if we consider what has 

 been done in other lines." 



Thus the question arises, Is it well for honey-producers 

 to undertake a work of such magnitude, when they already 

 have enough to do? Even the consideration of the stren- 

 uous requirements of rearing alone, without reference to 

 breeding, has led Mr. J. H. Martin, in Gleanings, to rec- 

 ommend that a certain number of bee-keepers in a given 

 locality turn their queen-rearing over to an expert in that 

 line of work, each bee-keeper to contribute his best stock, and 

 to agree to take a certain number of queens per annum, so 

 that, having a large and definite number of queens to rear, 

 the expert could rear them both cheaply and profitably. In 

 this manner the queens used by the bee-keepers would be 

 only one remove from the original ; whereas, by our pres- 

 nt method of rearing several generations of queens from one 



