204 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



Tune 



stroll- delicately over to the friendly 

 shelter of a barn, to remove the 

 stings and vainly try to make myself 

 invulnerable. It was not necessary to 

 open a hive to investigate this de- 

 moniac frenzy. At the home yards 

 this condition did not .start quite so 

 early nor did they get ([uitc so bad, 

 but' considerably worse than anything 

 1 had e.xpcrienced before. 



Now for the possible cause. I have 

 for seven years allowed a few sheep 

 in the home apiary to keep down the 

 grass. These, at "first, were Suffolks. 

 having smooth black faces, a ready 

 mark for the bees. Last year I 

 changed to Oxfords. These have very 

 woolly faces, few vulnerable spots, 

 and they are not nearly so much 

 afraid of bees as the Suffolks. Hav- 

 ing a few young rams, I shut them in 

 the apiary, and my theory is that 

 they disturbed the bees at nights. At 

 the outapiary the cause was similar, 

 though conditions differed. It was 

 after the honey was ofif and work for 

 the season was over that I discov- 

 ered what seemed a plausible reason 

 for the anger of the bees. The bluff, 

 a few feet from the hives, had been, 

 during the fly season, the stamping 

 ground at night for a bunch of 

 horses. The soil was a very heavy, 

 rubber-like clay. I think they would 

 feel the vibration, with the resultant 

 irritability. Do you think this pos- 

 sible, or has anything similar ever 

 been reported? CANADA. 



(We believe your surmise is right. 

 It takes very little to render some 

 bees cross. When they once become 

 cross, it seems to remain in the fam- 

 ily. The only way we have ever 

 found to change the disposition was 

 to change the queen. But the initial 

 cause of the ill-disposition must be 

 also altered.— C. P. D.) 



Queen Bee Introduction by Means 

 of All- Young Bees 



By F. Greiner 



Our friend. Jay Smith, tells in Glean- 

 ing of some humiliating facts as re- 

 gards queen introduction. I have no- 

 ticed we go along sometimes a term 

 of years and have remarkable success 

 in introducing, and all of a sudden, 

 when we think we have the thing pat, 

 we meet our Waterloo. To confine a 

 new to-be-introduced queen under a 

 push-into-the-comb cage is a very old 

 one, and as good a one as I know of. 

 Many years ago I received queens in 

 the mails in such cages. They con- 

 sisted of a shallow wooden frame, 

 covered on one side with wire screen 

 and closed up on the other side with 

 a tin slide. Several prongs were fas- 

 tened to the frame. They were to be 

 pushed into the comb over some 

 honey and hatching brood, if possi- 

 ble, and presto, the bees and queen 

 were liberated on the comb. Our 

 friend Smith's cage is better, in as 

 much as prongs are all around the 

 cage, thus preventing an untimely es- 

 cape of the bees within the cage. I 

 think here was the weak point of the 

 old style cage. The principle of the 

 cage is that the strange bees come 

 in direct touch with the comb struc- 



ture and a portion of the young bees, 

 which hatch under the cage. With 

 just emerging bees one may do al- 

 most anything; they mingle peace- 

 fully with any other bees, accept any 

 kind of a queen, stay anywhere, etc., 

 and the past season it occurred to me 

 they might be made the reception 

 committee to have strange bees intro- 

 duced into their comunity and so I 

 tried it in a few cases late in the sea- 

 son. It gave me e.^cellent results and 

 I write this in the hope to induce 

 other beekeepers to try this method 

 this summer. It is not necessary that 

 we see the young bees emerge; there 

 are usually plenty of young fuzzy 

 bees on any brood comb which an ex- 

 perienced beekeeper may select from 

 among the other inmates, pick 

 them up by the wings and tuck them 

 into the cage where the strange 

 queen is. The more of these young 

 bees we can stuff into the cage with- 

 out overcrowding the better. The 

 next day an opening may be made, or 

 the tin slide over the candy hole may 

 l)e removed and the uniting of the 

 folk within with those without will 

 proceed harmoniously. We can well 

 afford to take more time to make sure 

 of introducing a queen bee; it is not 

 simply the loss of a qv.een which is 

 at stake, but also the greater useful- 

 ness of a colony of bees, which may 

 mean more than the mere value of a 

 queen. 



New York. 



cation, generally, for beekeeping here 

 in Warren County, Pennsylvania. 

 Principal sources of honey are hard 

 and soft maples, dandelion, fruit 

 bloom, red raspberry, white-wood, 

 white and alsike clover, basswood, sit- 

 mac, buckwheat, fall asters and 

 goldenrod, making quite a good list of 

 honey-yielding plants and trees. Our 

 seasons are short and cool, too much 

 so for comb-honey production, but ex- 

 tracted ordinarily docs (luite well. 



Our winters arc long and cold, with 

 deep snows, and many years so steady 

 cold that bees do not get a flight for 

 fully four months. 



We have a nice home demand at re- 

 tail for all the honey produced, at 

 good prices. Farmers generally are 

 inclined to increase the acreage of 

 alsike clover and buckwheat, which 

 adds quite materially to the honey 

 crops, and the late buckwheat crop 

 stimulates brood rearing late and fills 

 the hives nicely with both brood and 

 honey, which puts the bees in fine 

 condition, usually, for the long, cold 

 winters. 



While we do not get the large 

 honey crops obtained in many parts 

 of the country, yet we are reasonably 

 certain of a surplus every year when 

 bees are properly cared for. 



Pennsylvania. 



A GoocI Location 



Bees here have generally wintered 

 very poorly, many small beekeepers 

 losing all their bees, and many ordi- 

 narily quite successful beekeepers los- 

 ing 10 to 20 per cent of their colonies ; 

 many weak colonies, long, cold winter 

 and late, backward spring. Last year 

 bees did fairly well. European foul- 

 brood has had its effect on bees not 

 well cared for, many farmer beekeep- 

 ers losing all they had from foulbrood 

 and neglect. We have very good lo- 



A Short Story 



"I see, in the British Bee Journal 

 for March 25, a quotation from 'The 

 Shooting Times" which asserts that 

 bees use their sting as a trowel to 

 finish the honey cell and drop a little 

 bit of the poison into the honey be- 

 fore sealing up tlie cell, saying that 

 'without it the honey would spoil.' Is 

 there any truth in that statement?" — 

 Ontario. 



Answer — The party who wrote that 

 is not the only man to hold that bees 

 put a drop of poison in each cell of 

 honey before sealing it. Even as re- 

 spectable an authority as Gaston Bon- 

 nier, author of "Les Nectaires," and of 



yuict Italians on the coml. 



