Feb. 20, 17('2. 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL, 



119 



brccdiiig-ciMccn to slarl willi, niul Iclliiig llicm mate vvilh 

 promiscuous drones, the Ijcst blood is too much diluliil. 

 Mrs. Uaiber, in the Koeky Mountain lice Journal, cinpli.it- 

 ically endorses that plan, saying that she does not believe 

 queen-breeders jiroduce boney enough to give their bees a 

 chance to show what they are; but if each bee-keeger fur- 

 nished a few of the best <iueens of his whole apiary, that 

 would be securing stock whose working capacity had been 

 tested. 



This plan is alluded to in the Review by Mr. F. B. Simp- 

 son, a breeder of trotting horses and Jersey cows, who has 

 recently turned his attention to bees, and is writing a series 

 of articles, not yet completed, for the Review, on the appli- 

 cation of the principles of stock-breeding to bees. Mr. Simp- 

 son would prefer to follow a plan which would give the 

 breeder a chance to establish a business and reputation for 

 hiinself, and outlines the system he would follow. He would 

 have over a hundred full colonies in addition to nuclei in 

 his own apiary, and would contract with bee-keepers in 

 his vicinity for the privilege of rc-quccning 500 additional 

 colonies, tlie queens to remain his property, for the purpose 

 of testing tlie honey-producing qualities of the bees of the 

 queens furnished. He would start with six of the best 

 queens procurable, as unrelated as possible, using each queen 

 in turn as a drone-mother with the others as queen-mothers, 

 thus getting thirty combinations of blood for testing. In 

 ensuing years just enough new queens would be purchased to 

 avoid in-breeding, .to which he is opposed. This is but the 

 gist of his plan, which should be read in full in the August 

 Review to be understood. 



On the subject of in-breeding, by the way, I find opposing 

 views in the various articles. Mr. A. C. Miller, already 

 quoted, says : "Variation once started seems to run riot unless 

 fixed by scientific breeding-in ;" and after pointing out that 

 inbreeding intensifies characteristics, whether good or bad' 

 his conclusion is — "Select properly, and it is your greatest 

 helper; select poorly, and it is your greatest enemy." 



Mr. H. L. Jeffrey, in Gleanings, says the worth of a 

 blooded animal is in his ability to stamp the blood qualities, 

 and refers to Mercury, the famous ■ Jersey bull, for whose 

 services $75 were offered, 23 of whose 32 ancestors were 

 descended from one pair. 



Mr. J. H. Gerbracht says in Gleanings : "There is not in 

 existence to-day a single strain of unusual superiority of 

 either cattle, hogs, or chickens, in which this principle has 

 not been employed to secure a fixed type ; and after this 

 has been done, the fixed type can be maintained only by 

 the most careful and scientific line-breeding. Crosses be- 

 tween dilferent strains produce just the same unreliability 

 and tendency to degeneration as crosses of distinct breeds 

 do, except in the few cases in which, either by accident or 

 the exercise of the most unusual good judgment, the two 

 strains happen to 'nick' well. In cattle and swine breed- 

 ing, the infusion of one-eighth new blood is considered 

 enough to affect whatever ill effects close inbreeding may 

 produce, the idea being to use the least possible amount to 

 maintain the vigor and stamina, with as little disturbance 

 of characteristics and type as possible; and the success of the 

 breeder depends to a great extent on his ability to do this 

 accurately." In poultry breeding, he says inbreeding and 

 line-breeding are the only ways by which any fixity of tj'pe 

 can be secured, and while the results are sometimes only 

 good to look at, yet the best laying and most vigorous 

 growing stock we have to-day is from this same line- 

 breeding. 



George Shiber, a breeder of carrier-pigeons, says in the 

 American Bee Journal, "Most of the leading pigeon fliers 

 inbreed ; of course this can not be carried on indefinitely; 

 new blood has to be added, gradually, say, a quarter, an 

 eighth, or a sixteenth. It is an old saying, if you inbreed 

 stock it would soon decline or weaken. It is undoubtedly 

 true ; but the breeder unmercifully culls his stock." He 

 refers to a pigeon of his ow-n, from stock bred as closely 

 as possible, that flew 250 miles in seven hours over the 

 Alleghany Mountains. He thinks that if. for illustration, 

 two queens were chosen whose bees were long-tongued, but 

 of difi'ercnt strains, one to be a drone-mother and the other 

 a queen-mother, that but few of the resulting strain would 

 be as good as their parents, judging by the experience of the 

 breeders of other stock. 



On the other hand, Mr. Simpson urges that nature never 

 inbreeds unless compelled to; that, when it takes an ani- 

 mal several years to mature, there is an incentive to in- 

 breeding, in securing uniformity without loss of time, and 

 frequently inbreeding is resorted to just because no unre- 



lated individuals are at hand ; but neither of these reasons 

 holds good with bees, for a vast number of generations 

 can be reared in a short time, and an unlimited number 

 of unrelated individuals of equal value procured; that while 

 inbreeding of Jersey cattle has procured results in milk, 

 they are very nervous, undersized, subject to disease and 

 great mortality, and deficient in bringing forth living young; 

 that the fact that Jerseys abound in renowned ancestors 

 makes it impossible to say whether certain results were due 

 to successful inbreeding or successful selection independent 

 of inbreeding; tliat in trotting-horscs the real cause of pre- 

 potency is skillful selection and not inbreeding, which is 

 incidental and seldom close; that from personal observations 

 he is led to believe that close inbreeding in trotting-horscs is 

 a total failure, with some exceptions of parents of especial 

 vigor ; that inbreeding is resorted to mainly to get some one or 

 a few qualities, and this result is attained at the expense of 

 other qualities; that nowadays the best racing horses are also 

 the best all-round horses, because it has been found unwise 

 to breed for speed alone ; and he suggests that the best bee 

 is the best all-round bee. 



It is certainly an interesting and valuable fact that a 

 practical breeder of trotting-horses and Jersey cattle declares 

 against inbreeding, and prefers the difficulties of cross- 

 breeding, by which it is very much harder to obtain 

 a fixed type. But we have not yet been accurately informed 

 whether the unsuccessful results from inbreeding are more 

 numerous, or more prevalent, or of a worse character on 

 the whole, than the unsuccessful results from outcrossing. 

 Perhaps the exact information is unavailable. We should 

 remember that it is not a mark of superior intelligence, 

 but rather the contrary, for inexperienced persons invariably 

 to take one side or the other in disputed questions. I sug- 

 gest, therefore, that we keep an open mind on this sub- 

 ject, and reserve judgment. We wish to breed both for 

 vigor of constitution and for permanency of type ; and if we 

 fall in either one, we have not succeeded in breeding. 



The next question is. What principles, in addition to the 

 well-known principle, "like produces like," should govern 

 our selection of breeding stock, in order that we should be 

 up-to-date in applying to bees all that we can supply of the 

 knowledge gained by breeding other animals? Mr. Simp- 

 son has so far given us but otie article on that subject, 

 besides the one on inbreeding, and so, after summarizing 

 that article and a few general principles laid down by Mr. 

 Miller, I shall be obliged to leave the subject in an incom- 

 plete state, as the bee-papers have not yet finished it. Mr. 

 Simpson takes up the popular fallacy of breeding frorn the 

 queen whose bees produce the most honey. That trait by 

 no means indicates that that queen has a special power of 

 transmitting her own qualities, but rather the reverse, for 

 the very fact that she is out of the ordinary indicates that 

 she does not belong to a uniform strain, and that her daugh- 

 ters are not likely to be like her. The majority have for 

 years bred from the least uniform, hoping to obtain uni- 

 formity, thus sacrificing blood for individuality. The proper 

 queens to breed from are those which produce the high- 

 est proportion of daughters above the average. In fact 

 the less the increase of average with which we are satisfied, 

 the more certain are we to maintain it. He would prefer to 

 select on a basis of five or ten pounds' increase over the 

 parents' averages, if the colonies were kept as nearly as 

 possible in like conditions, avoiding manipulation. A queen 

 should pass through one winter and one honey crop before 

 he would do any selecting. In buying the original queens, 

 their previous honey-yield would cut no figure, and only 

 their daughters' yields would be used as the basis in con- 

 sidering an increase of yield. In getting additional queens 

 for new blood, he would prefer to get a dozen untested 

 queens early enough to select a breeder from them after 

 one winter and a honey-flow. His breeders should do their 

 duty as queens in full-sized hives, so that he could from 

 year to year compare their yield with other queens, and so 

 that he could judge of their longevity under normal con- 

 ditions. 



Further, even if one breeding-queen produced daughters 

 all of which gave a yield of 150 pounds each, he would not 

 select one of them for a breeder to depend upon, because 

 it would be too great an increase to be maintained. Daugh- 

 ters would be reared from one of them, but only as an 

 experiment outside of his system, and none would be used 

 in the system until they proved able to transmit hereditary 

 uniformity. His breeders woiild themselves be good aver- 

 age queens, but not the best as queens, because he estimates 

 the power to produce like offspring as very much higher than 



