436 



GI.EANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



June 1. 



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DESIRABLE TRAITS IN BEES. 



It was March, and one of those boisterous 

 days that are hkely to come at this season. I 

 sometimes think our State in March is the 

 battle-ground for the Titanic forces of winter 

 and spring which fight here like demons to 

 see which shall have the supremacy. Spring 

 usually wins in the struggle, but only after 

 many a hard-fought battle. No one wished 

 to face the storm, and one after another drop- 

 ped into my shop. Fasset brought his wife's 

 second cousin, Charley Atkins, and even Jonas 

 Jenkins came in to warm himself. Poor man ! 

 I felt sorry for him, he looked so forlorn. I 

 had my work pretty well up, and we talked of 

 sections and supers and separators till Fasset 

 remarked, " I thought, Lisha, you were going 

 to tell us more about how to get a breed of 

 non-swarming bees. If it takes as long to 

 produce a breed as it does for you to tell how, 

 we may none of us live long enough to see 

 them." 



They all laughed a little and I began. 



" We were speaking the other day of the 

 different instincts of bees, and decided that 

 that of propolis - gathering with improved 

 hives was no longer needed, and should be 

 bred out. There is another instinct that, 

 while I do not think it desirable to breed out, 

 should be so modified as to eliminate its more 

 objectionable features, and that is the instinct 

 of defending their stores. Our bees, if possi- 

 ble, should be gentle, or at least so as to be 

 handled with little danger of stings. Then 

 there is the brood-rearing instinct. This 

 should be developed to the utmost, especially 

 in early spring. Other things being equal, 

 our success will depend largely on our ability 

 to get a large amount of brood started as soon 

 as the weather will admit in spring. And 

 now we have the honey-gathering and the 

 swarming instincts, and these are contrary one 

 to the other. You know we have appetites 

 and desires in our own natures that are con- 

 trary." 



"That is so," said the deacon. " If I know 

 my own heart, I want to do what is right ; 

 but sometimes my temper gets the better of 

 me, and I say and do things I ought not." 



" I fear we all do," said I, trying to comfort 

 him. " You know St. Paul said, ' What I do, 

 that I hate ; ' and I have wished the bees had 

 the instinct of honey-gathering strong enough 

 to keep them right in the line of storing hon- 

 ey, but they haven't. In hundreds of in- 

 stances, and I don't know but thousands, the 

 first indications of swarming will be a weak- 

 ening of the honey-gathering instinct, and 

 the swarming instinct becoming stronger, un- 

 till almost every bee in the hive will leave, 

 without a tear, the brood they have nursed so 

 tenderly and the honey they have stored so 

 laboriously, and away they go as merry as a 



marriage-bell, leaving it all for ever behind 

 them." 



" It's curious," said Fasset. 



"Yes, it is curious, and provoking too," 

 said I. "Just when you get a colony nicely 

 at work in the sections to have them round 

 them up or cap them off half finished, and 

 then sivarni ! And if you place the swarm in 

 a new hive without foundation or old combs, 

 or with them, by the time they are again ready 

 to store in the super the flowers are drying up, 

 and you have your labor for your pains. This 

 is not the case with every colony or in every 

 season, but far too often. And then there is 

 the loss of time in preparing to swarm. I sup- 

 pose hundreds of non-swarming hives and de- 

 vices have been invented, and many of them 

 patented, to prevent just this state of things ; 

 but so far the most or all of them have proved 

 a delusion and a snare." 



" But what are you going to do about it?" 

 inquired Charley Atkins. 



"Just this," I replied. ' "I am going to de- 

 velop the honey gathering and comb building 

 instincts to the utmost by using only queens 

 for queen-rearing from the best honey-pro- 

 ducing stocks, selecting from year to year 

 with the utmost care ; and then I am going to 

 stunt, dwarf, and make abortive the swarming 

 instinct in every possible way, especially by 

 using for rearing my queens only queens with 

 weakened swarming instincts. I tell you, my 

 friends, it can be done. Even colonies with 

 the normal swarming instinct can be kept 

 very largely from swarming by stimulating to 

 the utmost their honey gathering instinct. 

 Many years ago I constructed quite a large 

 number of hives, rather tall, long, and quite 

 narrow, and when clover came I placed a large 

 number of boxes on each side, and, if strong, 

 on top also. The hives being very narrow 

 stimulated the bees to build out at the sides, 

 and store with honey ; and bees in such hives 

 did not swarm half as much as in the ordinary 

 Ivangstroth hive. I should have kept on using 

 them, but they were not adapted to sections, 

 so I changed. This I conceive to be the real 

 reason why the free use of the extractor pre- 

 vents swarming. It stimulates honey gather- 

 ing to the utmost, and the swarming instinct 

 is overbalanced and almost obliterated It 

 would not be surprising if our best non -swarm- 

 ing strains were to come from bees that have 

 long been run for extracted honey. I was 

 talking not long ago with one of the most en- 

 terprising bee-keepers of our State, who has 

 hundreds of colonies. He told how he had 

 bought queens from a number of queen breed- 

 ers. Some had been quite worthless, while 

 others were valuable. From one breeder he 

 thought he had the best working bees in his 

 yards. He had introduced several of these 

 queens, which had proved the most industri- 

 ous bees he had. ' How about swarming? ' I 

 inquired. He said he had never, if I remem- 

 ber rightly, had a hive of these bees swarm. 

 I wrote to the breeder in regard to them. He 

 wrote me that these queens were bred from 

 his famous honey-queen, now two years old, 

 etc. This shows how that, even in storing 

 honey in sections, the honey gathering and 



