460 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



June 15. 



tion than formerly, but believes he can add to 

 its usefulness by the practical work in which 

 he is about to engage. He may extend his 

 travels to Cuba, taking his camera with him. 

 Mr. Hill's work will be observed with interest. 



Mr. Hill has had an invitation to visit Dr. 

 Viete, of Cienfuegos, Cuba. Dr. V. harvested 

 180 tons of honev in one season. 



Our Symposium. 



LARGE HIVES. 



Egg-laying Capacity of Queens : Large Hives Prac- 

 tically Non-swarming: the Proof of the 

 Pudding is in the Eating. • 



BY CHAS. DADANT. 



Yes, I made a mistake in figuring the num- 

 ber of cells in a Gallup comb. I hope that 

 my readers will excuse it by remembering 

 that, when we get old, our faculties decrease 

 in proportion with the age. But this mistake 

 does not annul my arguments. A hive with 

 9 Gallup combs, i. e., with 57,294 cells, to re- 

 ceive the eggs of the queen, or, rather, with 

 51,000 cells for bees, needs at least one comb 

 to receive the food, honey, and pollen; has 

 room for but 2400 eggs per day, while a good 

 queen can lay more than 3000 eggs daily. 



To ascertain how many eggs a good queen 

 is able to lay, I did not confine my observa- 

 tions to the number she can lay in one minute, 

 but I computed the number of square inches 

 occupied vith brood at the same time, in sev- 

 eral good colonies ; and in multiplying this 

 number by 55 I found about from 70,000 to 

 80,000 having eggs or brood. This number, 

 divided by 21, the number of days a cell is oc- 

 cupied, gave me from 3300 to 3800 per day. 

 Of course, such experiments can not be made 

 with the nine-frame Gallup hive. 



" But," says Mr. Doolittle, " if a queen lays 

 6 eggs in a minute, 360 in one hour, 3600 in 10 

 hours, why does she not lay 8640 in 24 hours, 

 and 181,140 in 21 days?" 



I wonder why Mr. Doolittle asks me such a 

 question. Does he ignore the fact that no an- 

 imal can work 24 hours without rest? He 

 does not ignore the fact that the queen is nurs- 

 ed by the workers, which, when she approach- 

 es them, turn their heads toward her, as is 

 shown on the first page of the Langstroth 

 book, and that the bees in front stretch out 

 their tongues to offer her some food. Of 

 course, during winter and during cold days 

 the queen is about motionless. She begins to 

 move in winter as soon as the weather is warm- 

 er; then the workers offer but little food, for 

 their stomachs are about empty; but as soon 

 as they can fly a little outside, the number of 

 those that meet the queen increases. She eats 

 more, begins to lay, and her laying capacity 

 increases in proportion to the gathering of 

 honey and pollen, and to the increasing num- 

 ber of bees working outside, which do not 

 work 24 hours daily. 



Then Mr. Doolittle says, " Bro. Dadant gives 

 an instance where a colony in a large hive 

 gave him 160 lbs. of comb honey which he 

 sold at 27 cents a pound, the result of which 

 would be $43.20. In back volumes of the bee- 

 papers can be found my report of a colony 

 that gave me 309 lbs. of section honey, and 

 plenty in the hive for winter." I can answer 

 that this quotation of mine was not made to 

 show the largest crop we had obtained from 

 a single hive, but to show that this colony, in 

 a large hive, strong in bees in March, gave me 

 better results than the smaller ones could give. 

 In narrating my purchase of this large hive 

 my object was to show that I had not made a 

 mistake in buying it for $7.00 while the small 

 ones were sold for §3.00 or $4.00. I may add 

 that we have never, except in this case, weigh- 

 ed the crop of our bees; as, in good years, we 

 harvest our honey several times in summer, 

 we do not take the trouble to note the quanti- 

 ty wven by every colony as Mr. Doolittle does. 



Our crop of honey from each colony can 

 not equal the crop of Mr. Doolittle, for we 

 have only white clover, and occasionally fall 

 flowers, while he has a quantity of lindens 

 around his apiary. 



Our large hives do not give us as much work 

 in summer as the Gallup hive, for we have 

 very few swarms. Our home apiary, number- 

 ing 80 colonies, did not give us ten natural 

 swarms in three years ; while I see in the 

 Progressive Bee-keeper for January, 1898, p. 

 20, that Mr. Doolittle had 548 natural swarms 

 in the same spring, from 49 colonies. 



In our Langstroth Revised, page 237. we 

 give a letter from a bee-keeper in Indiana, 

 who, in 1883, had 505 swarms from 165 colo- 

 nies. We reproduced this letter because we 

 thought that such a rate, of three natural 

 swarms per colony, could not be surpassed ; 

 but Mr. Doolittle, with his 7 natural swarms 

 from each of his 49 colonies, as well as in the 

 production of honey, can not be equaled by 

 any bee-keeper. 



Mr. Doolittle says that ' ' the proof of the 

 pudding is in the eating." But a struggle for 

 superiority between two cooks can be solved 

 only by the eaters. My readers saw in Glean- 

 ings for May 1, page 344, the offer of Mr. 

 Draper in favor or the large hive. Besides, 

 in the Amer. Bee Journal, May 11, page 292, 

 Mr. W. H. Eagerty, of Kansas, writes : " From 

 actual use of both large and small hives I will 

 take the large one every time." 



If Mr. Doolittle thinks that these opinions 

 are not sufficient I will give that of another 

 bee-keeper, who says, in the Progressive Bee- 

 keeper for November, 1897, page 296, "In 

 July, 1877, 1 had a colony in an especially long 

 hive constructed for an experiment, contain- 

 ing 32 frames which had, as nearly as estima- 

 tion could get at it, 99,500 bees. This colony 

 gave 566 lbs. of surplus honev that season." 

 Signed : G. M. Doolittle. 



I do not think that I have any thing to add 

 to such a quotation. 



Hamilton, 111., May 15. 



[Shortly after the receipt of the foregoing 

 there came an article from A. N. Draper. As 



