682 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Sept. 15. 



pers practically queen-excluding to make 

 them almost entirely so. Still, I doubt wheth- 

 er the thing is worth seeking after. All work- 

 er foundation and full sheets will accomplish 

 almost as much, will it not, as queen-exclud- 

 ing honey-boards? — Ed.] 



I WAS WEi^i. AWARE, Mr. Editor, of the 

 pleasure you take in making life a burden for 

 me; but I didn't think you'd be so fiendishly 

 vindictive as to do as you've done on p. 646, 

 trying to set all the supply-dealers and invent- 

 ors on me with samples of the " only ideal 

 hive." No, I don't want any "ideal." I've 

 settled on the eight-frame Dovetail, have 

 some eighty already occupied, and will keep 

 the old rotten things for supers at the close of 

 the honey harvest, and for nadirs in spring. 



Chicago has started a bee-keepers' associa- 

 tion of its own, with quarterly meetings. 

 There are 100 bee-keepers in the county, and 

 they propose to fight adulteration. They've 

 got a field for it, sure. Whoever blames Edi- 

 tor York for starting it (not adulteration, but 

 the society) may not be far out of the way. 

 [Do you mean, doctor, that Bro. York is to 

 be blamed for starting the fight against adul- 

 teration, or that the editor of the American 

 Bee Journal is the man who is at the bottom 

 of the fight? I think I know what you mean, 

 but I am not going to tell. — Ed.] 



" Do BEES ever perform any work ' always ' 

 in the same way ?' ' is your question, Mr. Editor, 

 p. 645. Perhaps not; but I never knew any 

 exception to the rule that, left to nature, a 

 queen enlarges her brood-nest in the spring 

 by laying eggs outside the cells already occu- 

 pied. Did you ? [Yes, I think I do. While 

 it is a rule that queens will lay as you say, yet 

 there are some freaky things that will do al- 

 most the very opposite. I still think you can 

 not attach the word "always" to any thing 

 that either the bees or the queens do in the 

 domestic economy of the hive. — Ed.] 



You OBJECT, Mr. Editor, to small starters 

 and drone comb in sections on account of 

 looks. Isn't there a more serious objection? 

 Unless you have plenty of drone comb in the 

 brood-chamber, the queen will too often go 

 up and lay in the drone comb in the sections. 

 If barred out by excluder, the bees don't un- 

 derstand that the queen can't get up, and will 

 hold some of those drone-cells empty for the 

 queen. I'm not guessing; I'm talking about 

 what I've seen and know. [Your testimony 

 on this point is backed up by that of hun- 

 dreds, and I may say thousands, of others.— 

 Ed.] 



The editor of Australian Bee Bulletin 

 says it was a woman he first saw throwing a 

 stone over a limb to shake down a swarm, but 

 he proposes to do better by keeping a supply 

 of rockets on hand. [I am wondering what 

 kind of women they have in Australia. I nev- 

 er saw a woman yet who could hit any thing 

 she threw at — much less heave a stone, with a 

 rope attached to it, over a high limb of a tree. 

 I should be glad to show a picture of the 

 woman who can perform such a feat; and if 

 she or her husband will send me her photo I 

 shall be glad to introduce her, with my very 



best bow, to the fraternity of American bee- 

 keepers. — Ed.] 



As SHOWING a marked difference in longev- 

 ity of queens, D. W. Heise says, in Canadian 

 Bee Journal, that out of 11 got from a United 

 States breeder in 1896, six were superseded in 

 1897, while he has queens in their fourth year 

 doing excellent service. But, friend Heise, 

 don't you know that a queen's chances for 

 long life are lessened when she has traveled 

 and been introduced ? [Does not this argue 

 that more bee-keepers should raise their own 

 queens? Doolittle's book tells all about how 

 to raise the best queens in the world; and if it 

 is a fact that transmission through the mails, 

 and introducing, does cut down the longevity 

 and perhaps the prolificness of queens, the 

 practical honey-producer — the man who sees 

 only bread a ad butter in the business — may 

 well consider the matter. To promulgate 

 such a doctrine will be rather bad on our own 

 queen-rearing business; but if it is the truth, 

 the truth must come out. Understand, I do 

 not take the position positively that queens 

 reared away from home, sent through the 

 mails, and introduced, are shorter-lived than 

 equally good queens reared at home. " Equal- 

 ly good queens." And this raises the ques- 

 tion whether the man who makes a spe- 

 cialty of comb honey can also produce as fine 

 a lot of queens as the one who makes a spe- 

 cialty of queen-rearing. All of these things 

 deserve our thoughtful consideration, and the 

 columns of GIvEanings are open for the fur- 

 ther discussion of the subject. — Ed.] 



LARGE HIVES. 



Size of Hive has Something to do with the Prolif- 

 icness of Queen; Large Hive Defined ; 

 French Hives. 



BY C. P. DADANT. 



Friend Ernest: — After having received your 

 request for a series of articles on large hives I 

 read over the discussion between you and our 

 Michigan friends, and will now give you our 

 experience in the matter. 



As I believe I said before in Gleanings, 

 this subject is somewhat stale with us. We 

 use large hives, as do all those who have tried 

 them, because we do not see how we could 

 keep bees in any thing smaller, and because 

 our experience shows us, from experiments on 

 a large scale, that they are preferable to small 

 hives. But I must insist, in the beginning, 

 that those who discuss the question, or the 

 most of them, do not take the matter from the 

 same standpoint that we do. Many who ob- 

 ject to large hives take the ten-frame Lang- 

 stroth brood-chamber as their standard for a 

 large hive, as compared with the eight-frame, 



