258 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



April 1. 



Let us suppose that Doolittle has a queen able 

 to lay 3600 eggs per day in one of his nine- 

 frame Gallup hives, of which no comb con- 

 tains more than 4600 cells, or for the nine, 

 41,400 cells. Every one of these cells will be 

 occupied by this prolific queen in less than 

 twelve days. Then the queen, unable to find 

 empty cells for nine days, will be dissatisfied 

 and will excite her bees to swarm. 



Of course Doolittle, who is always watching 

 his sixty hives, will cage the queen for ten or 

 twelve days, to punish her for doing her work 

 too well ; so by his method he increases his 

 work, instead of taking advantage of the value 

 of his best queens. , 



Let me add a few remarks : The nine Gallup 

 frames, on which the colonies of Doolittle are 

 confined, can not have 41,400 empty cells to 

 be used by the queen, for the workers always 

 take care of storing pollen and honey as near 

 the brood as possible. Then if one of these 

 nine combs is filled with victuals the queen 

 will have but 37,400 cells, or room to lay but 

 1800 eggs per day instead of 3600 ; hence the 

 population will- be smaller yet. 



Mr. Doolittle writes that the queens in his 

 ten-frame Langstroth hives did not lay more 

 than enough to fill nine Gallup combs. I 

 think that the cause of so poor a laying was 

 the small number of bees in the hives in early 

 spring. A large population and a large pro- 

 vision before winter give a large stock of 

 workers in spring ; but these requisites are 

 difficult to obtain with small hives. 



" But," says our friend Hutchinson, " if your 

 queens lay so many eggs they are soon over- 

 worked, and die." I can not see why our 

 queens would die younger than those which 

 are provided with small hives. The queens 

 doesn't lay at will. The eggs come out when 

 they are ripe, and the queen can not stop their 

 exit. 



If you drum a swarrn from a box hive you 

 can ascertain whether the queen is with the 

 bees by putting a black cloth under the swarm. 

 After two or three minutes, if the queen is 

 with the swarm you will see, on the cloth, the 

 eggs dropped by her, as she was unable to 

 keep them ; and not only these few eggs are 

 lost, but during the twenty or twenty-five 

 minutes of your drumming she lost her eggs, 

 being unable to keep them or to deposit them 

 in the cells, on account of the trouble caused 

 by your drumming. It is the same when a 

 queen goes from a comb to another in search 

 of empty cells. 



"But," adds Mr. Hutchinson, "Mr. Doo- 

 little has experimented on the matter. A 

 queen which had laid 5000 eggs per day, in 

 the whole season, was unable to live more 

 than one year." 



This report of Mr. Doolittle's reminds me 

 of the Englishman who, going from London 

 to Paris, arrived by boat at Calais, before sun- 

 rise, and went directly to the stage coach 

 going to Paris. In Calais he saw but one 

 woman, and she was cross-eyed. Thtn he 

 wrote in his diary : " In Calais the women are 

 cross-eyed." We have never made experi- 

 ments on one or two hives, for such experi- 

 ments prove nothing, but on 30 or 40 of each 



kind of hives during several years, to be sure 

 of the result. If our queens were killed by 

 overlaying, not in one but even in two years, 

 we should lose on the 80 colonies at home 

 more than three queens every month ; and 

 during the six months when there are no 

 drones to mate the young queens, fifteen of 

 our colonies would die every year ; yet our 

 winter losses, although we winter our bees on 

 their summer stands, do not exceed two or 

 three per cent on an average, in our home 

 apiary. The death of a queen in winter is the 

 death of the colony. 



Although this winter was very hard on bees, 

 my son wrote lately to the editor of the Amer- 

 ican Bee Journal (page 121, Feb. 15), "We 

 have just had a good day for the bees. The 

 colonies are strong. There is next to no 

 loss," etc. 



For tw r enty years or more we had a number 

 of colonies in ten-frame Langstroth hives, in 

 the tame apiary T , with about the same number 

 in eleven frames, Ouinby. We were then 

 selling queens, and colonies of Italian bees, 

 and our customers wanted mostly Langstroth 

 hives ; but the comparison, in the quantity of 

 honey produced and in the losses in winter, 

 was so unfavorable to the Langstroth hives 

 that we transferred their bees to our large 

 Ouinby hives, and we have now these old 

 hives rotting behind one of our shops. Thtir 

 number will increase this summer ; for when 

 our friend Hambaugh went to California three 

 years ago we bought of him his hives and fix- 

 tures, and left them on their place at Spring. 

 We have there a good young man to take care 

 of them. He wrote us lately : 



Have lost 12 colonies — 10 in L,angstroth hives. All 

 died with plenty of honey but two. The honey was 

 too scattered. 



Spring, 111., Feb. 21. 



We had there 80 colonies — 50 in Ouinby 

 eleven-frame hives, and 30 in Langstroth ten- 

 frames. So one-third of the colonies in Lang- 

 stroth hives died, while only one in 25 in our 

 large Ouinby s died. Do you not think that 

 such a comparison is in favor of the large 

 Quinby-Dadant hive ? 



Of course, if our bees in Langstroth hives 

 had been wintered in a cellar this loss would 

 have been avoided : but how could we have a 

 cellar in every one of our five outside apiaries ? 

 Besides, cellar wintering is not always success- 

 ful. When we built our house we partitioned 

 a part of the cellar to winter bees in it ; y r et 

 we found it difficult to keep a uniform tem- 

 perature in it during the whole winter, and 

 we noticed also that the bees were not as 

 healthy in spring as those wintered on their 

 summer stands ; so we resolved not to winter 

 them any more in the cellar, and this winter- 

 ing outside of our large hives gave us the best 

 results. 



Hamilton, 111. 



[Mr. Dadant is, if I am not mistaken, the 

 oldest living veteran we now have in our 

 ranks, among those who have been prominent 

 before the bee-keeping world. According to 

 Stenog, he will be 82 years old next May, and 

 yet at this fourscore mark he is still vigorous 

 in mind and body. 



