282 



AMERICAN BEE lOUKNAL 



May 1, 1902 



troduce a laying queen as soon as the time comes. Will 

 that work all right 7 How long will it be before the queen 

 comes dowd into the new hive ? Minnesota. 



Answers. — 1. No, I wouldn't advise it. I am very 

 much afraid it would not come up to your expectations. 



2. Very likely the}' swarmed out into one of the other 

 hives. 



3. I don't know ; and yet it is nothing very unusal for 

 brood to be present before bees are taken out of the cellar. 



4. Nothing unusual. 



5. They will probably come out all right. 



6. How are you going to tell where the queen is ? For 

 when you find eggs in the lower story you are not at all sure 

 the queen is there. I have had many colonies with two 

 stories, and when the queen laid a quantitj' of eggs she 

 ■would return to the upper story, and then kept going from 

 one story to the other, so that I could never tell which story 

 she was in without finding her. Possibly this plan may 

 serve your desire of knowing in which of two hives the 

 ■queen is without actually seeing her: Divide the colony, 

 putting part of the combs with their bees in another hive. 

 Two or three days later the part that has queen-cells started 

 will be the queenless one. Of course that is on the supposi- 

 tion that no queen-cells were present at the time of making 

 the division. 



Dogwood and Honeysuckle— Bumble-Bees— Increase. 



1. Does the enclosed flower yield honey? It grows on 

 a tree called " dogwood," and the woods are full of it, here- 

 abouts. Also, does " honeysuckle" yield honey ? 



2. Is the honey gathered from hops and bitterweed (wild 

 chamomile) bitter in taste? I bought some colonies in 

 Alabama lately, and the honey contained in the hives is 

 very bitter, and tastes like a drugstore. 



3. Do bumble-bees sting, or store honey? I notice 

 about my well a great lot of rather small black bees that 

 live in holes in the ground. To-da}' I noticed them balling 

 a queen. Do you know anything of them ? 



4. If I take four frames containing some brood from a 

 strong colony, and put it in a new hive, and move the old 

 hive to a new stand, will I not stand a fair chance of getting 

 two colonies ? What is the objection to this means of in- 

 creasing when one does not know enough about queen-rear- 

 ing to increase via nuclei ? Mississippi. 



Answers. — 1. The dogwood (cornus florida) which you 

 send does not, I think, yield honey, and the bees have not 

 tongues long enough to reach into the deep flowers of the 

 honeysuckle. 



2. I don't know ; I'm afraid it is. 



3. Bumble-bees sting, as many a barefoot farmer's boy 

 can testify ; and they store honev, but never in any consid- 

 erable quantity. I never found a nest with as much as a 

 tablespoonful of honey in it. I have seen small black bees, 

 but I am not acquainted with their habits. 



4. Yes, you will stand a fair chance of having two colo- 

 nies, and possibly three ; for if the queen is taken to the 

 •new stand, and the queenless part left on the old stand, that 

 queenless part, being strong, may send out a swarm when 

 the first young queen emerges. An objection to the plan is 

 that the queenless part will not have any increase from its 

 new queen for nearly six weeks. 



Drones— Rearing Queens-Transferring, Etc. 



1. I have drones from a laying worker whose mother 

 was a full-blood Italian queen ; they are so yellow that you 

 can tell them as far as you can see them. The drones in an- 

 other full-blood Italian colony look like common black ones 

 a little way ofi". Why is this ? and which is right ? 



2. This is our main swarming-time, but on account of the 

 cold spring they have not started but are killing oflf the 

 drones like they do late in the summer. Why is this ? 



3. Will drones from one hive go into another hive ? 



4. Suppose I give a queenless colony young brood to 

 rear, saj- to-day, and they start to rear a queen, how many 

 days before they will have one sealed up ? 



5. Which will they use, an egg or one just hatched ? 



6. Which will be the most apt to try to rear a queen, one 

 with laying workers or without ? If there is any difference, 

 which race will be the most likely to rear one, Italian, black 

 or Carniolan ? 



7. Speaking of black, we have what a bee-keeper called 

 a " brown gum " and " a little black fellow " that would try 



to sting the " old boy " himself. Which is meant when bee- 

 papers say " black ? " 



8. I have a large numberof queenlesscolonies. Lastsum- 

 mer and fall I think a large number superseded, and reared 

 young queens. Do you suppose this has anything to do 

 with the present large number of queenless ones ? If so, 

 how ? 



9. I know the comb comes off of the bees ; where do they 

 keep it, or rather, where does it come out ? 



10. Now, Dr. Miller, you know more about bees in S min- 

 utes than I do in a year, but I want to give a point or two. I 

 read your answers to all our greenhorn questions ; you ad- 

 vise several in answer to their question about transferring 

 out of box-hives to do so in fruit-bloom time. I am sure that 

 is all right up there, but in this part of the country, and 

 may be in other parts, it is quite different. It is 2 or 3 weeks 

 from fruit-bloom until our nest honey-flow, and it is nearly 

 always cold during fruit-bloom and for the next 3 or more 

 weeks. Should one transfer then, and not feed, he would 

 lose his bees, every time. The reason I call your attention 

 to this is, because I believe that nearly all of us greenhorns 

 that have bees in bos-hives would never think of feeding, 

 but would use an empty hive or dry combs. Alabama. 



Answers. — 1. I don't know why it is, but there seems to 

 be a great variation in appearance of drones, and either one 

 may be pure stock. 



2. Weather so cold that bees do not gather freely is suf- 

 ficient reason in the eyes of the workers for disposing of 

 their lazy brothers. 



3. Yes, they seem to be free commoners. 



4. In something like three or four days. 



5. A larva perhaps two days old, or younger. 



6. I don't know whether there is any difference ; if there 

 is, I should guess the Carniolan. 



7. The subject is a little mised, but usually the term 

 " brown German " aud the " black " mean the same thing. 

 Tunisian bees are the blackest I ever had, and possibly the 

 blackest that exist, and the ones I had were what my assis- 

 tant called " vindictive little sinners." 



8. It may, and it may not. The young queens may have 

 been lost when taking their wedding-flight. As a rule, I 

 think there is little loss of queens when bees do their own 

 superseding. 



9. Look sharp and you can see the little scales of wax 

 between the rings on the under side of the abdomen, where 

 they are secreted by the wax-glands. 



10. No one realizes more fully than I the fact that there 

 are a whole lot of things that I don't know about bees ; and 

 I feel a good deal like a humbug sometimes when I try to 

 answer about things hundreds of miles away where I have 

 never been, and I will be ever so much obliged if you good 

 people in the South will straighten me out when I go wild in 

 my answers. You probably are entirely right that fruit- 

 bloom would be a bad time for you to transfer. More and 

 more that time is going out of use, and the transferring is 

 not done till 21 days after the issuing of the first swarm. 



Stimulative Feeding. 



Why is it that stimulative feeding of bees in the spring, 

 in the hands of amateurs, is always spoken of as a danger- 

 ous business, and referred to as a two-edged sword, etc.? 



New Brunswick. 



Answer. — Because feeding induces the bees to fly, and 



if the weather is such that they will be chilled and lost, 



there may not be a sufficient gain in brood to overbalance 



the loss. 



.*"»-»^ 



Pollen Substitute and Robbing. 



Will throwing out corn-meal, rye or Graham flour that 

 has enticed bees from other apiaries cause robbing ? 



Illinois. 



Answer. — I do not believe that exposing any substitute 

 for pollen will cause robbing. 



■Queenie Jeanette is the title of a pretty song in sheet 

 music size, written by J. C. Wallenmeyer, a musical bee- 

 keeper. The regular price is 40 cents, but to close out the 

 copies we have left, we will mail them at 20 cents each, a- 

 long as they last. 



