1900 



GLEANINGS IN BKE CUIvTURE. 



521 



45 per cent ; older specimens, about 35 per 

 cent. A broiler would, therefore, bring about 

 40 cents; a matured one, 75 cents to $1,00. 

 These are the actual prices obtainable here, 

 although our regular hotels will not pay more 

 than 10 or 12 cents per pound. But they 

 would not offer any more than that for fancy 

 capons, and yet I obtained 18 cc;nts for all I 

 grew the past season, and that within 15 miles 

 of my home. 



I think I can now leave the reader to judge 

 for himself whether it would be advisable for 

 him to engage in the industry. 



I hope the above may answer the many in- 

 quiries I have had of ihe readers of Glean- 

 ings since I wrote the arlicle for June 1, and 

 I would ask them to pardon me for not ans- 

 wering all the letters received in detail, which 

 would be utterly impossible. 



Naples, N. Y., June 14. 



[I must acknowledge that my statement in 

 relerence to the size of Belgian hares I saw in 

 Colorado, where I compared them to a good- 

 sized dog, is a little indefinite. The specimens 

 that I looked at were larger than any good big 

 cat I had seen ; but in referring to the dog I 

 did not have in mind mastiffs, but the com- 

 mon house-dogs one sees every day around 

 home. 



Referring to the last paragraph, I hope our 

 readers will bear in mind that it is not feasi- 

 ble or practicable for our regular correspon- 

 dents to answer by letter all questions put to 

 them. A better way, when sending questions, 

 is to request answers through Gleanings. 

 The correspondents will get pay for their time, 

 and will also be able to answer hundreds of 

 others in whose minds the same inquiries may 

 arise. 



I have always known Mr. Greiner to be a 

 very careful and conservative bee-keeper, and 

 I assume that he is, as a matter of course, 

 equally conservative on the subject of grow- 

 ing Belgian hares. As I take it, he is inter- 

 ested in them only for market purposes, and 

 therefore has no "ax to grind " for our read- 

 ers. 



I am now arranging to get some specimens, 

 and hope to be able to have a practical knowl- 

 edge of them myself in the course of time ; 

 because, if this business combines nicely with 

 bee-keeping, we should certainly know some- 

 thing about it. — Ed.] 



FROM THE FRESHLY LAID EGG TO THE FULLY 

 DEVELOPED QUEEN. 



Age of LarvBB that Bees Ordinarily Select for 

 Queen-rearing; Some Interesting Obser- 

 vations. 



BY DR. C. C MILLER. 



On page 199, Vol. I. of the American Bee 

 Journal, the Baron of Berlepsch gives details 

 of an experiment he made, in which queen- 

 cells were sealed nearly 10 days after the eggs 

 were laid, and the queen emerged from the 

 cell fully 18 days after the laying of the egg. 



In another experiment the time was 17 days, 

 "These experiments," he says, "show that 

 the opinion generally entertained, that the 

 queens emerge between the 17th and 18th day 

 after the eggs are laid, is correct." This was 

 forty years ago. Jvater, 16 days came to be 

 accepted as the orthodox length of time for a 

 queen, and still later some have called the 

 time 15 days. T. W. Cowan says that queens 

 mature "in from 14 to 17 days from the day 

 the egg is laid." In a table of "Metamor- 

 phoses of Bees," British Bee-keepers' Guide- 

 book, page 10, he gives what is probably meant 

 to be the average, as follows : 



1. Time of incubation of egg 3 days. 



2. Time of feeding the larvae 5 " 



3. Spinning cocoon by larvae 1 " 



4. Period of rest 2 " 



5. Transformation of larvae into 



nymphs '. 1 " 



6. Time in nymph state 3 " 



Total 15 " 



It is probable that a principal reason for the 

 formerly accepted longer time, and for the con- 

 siderable variation allowed by so good an au- 

 thority as Mr. Cowan, comes from the fact 

 that nuclei instead of full colonies were used 

 in some of the cases for observation. Ber- 

 lepsch used ' ' a small forced swarm ' ' in the 

 experiment which gave him 18 days. Possi- 

 bly if observations were always made with 

 full colonies under favorable conditions Mr. 

 Cowan's 15 days might never be exceeded. 

 It will be noted that Mr. Cowan has the larva 

 fed 5 days and Berlepsch nearly 7, Cowan's 

 queen being sealed when 8 days old, and Ber- 

 lepsch's when nearly 10, counting from the 

 laying of the egg. 



Incidentally, I made some observations last 

 summer as to dates of sealing and hatching, 

 while experimenting as related on page 834 of 

 Gleanings for last year. It may be remem- 

 bered that the five combs, a, b, c, d, e, were 

 given in succession to the same queen to be 

 laid in, so that every egg in any comb was 

 older than all the eggs of any comb coming 

 later in the list. I rather expected to find 

 that the cells, both worker and queen, would 

 be sealed in the order of their ages, all the 

 cells of a being sealed before any cells in b, 

 and so on. Such was not the case, for July 7 

 I found 6 worker cells sealed in b while some 

 cells were still unsealed in a. It might be 

 supposed that the position might have some- 

 thing to do with it, the bees being more slow 

 to seal cells in the outside comb, a. But this 

 argument could not apply at the other side of 

 the brood nest, for July 12 1 found 4 worker- 

 cells sealed in e while there were cells still un- 

 sealed in d. It seems clear that in this case 

 cells were not sealed 5=trictly in the order of 

 ages. 



Julv 6 I found about 10 square inches of 

 sealed worker brood in a when the oldest larva 

 was less than 8 days and 30 minutes old (I 

 count always from the laying of the egg). 

 This agrees with Cowan's table, "time of 

 feeding the larvae, 5 days." As some little 



