Sept. 1, 1911 



®(o)[jdw©[P^siGd(o)[]d© \15^dGDd [ffl(o)(o)DDGfiD(i 



At Borodino, New York 



AGE OF bees; a SINGULAR FACT IN REGARD 

 TO DRONES. 



"An old bee-keeper told me that many 

 bees live to be a year old. Is this a fact ?" 



"The worker-bee rarely lives longer than 

 45 days during .Tune, July, August, and 

 September ; while those emerging from 

 their cells in September may live until the 

 next May or June, if not injured by our 

 winters, their life being prolonged above 

 the 45 days in proportion to the work that 

 they do or the hardships they are required 

 to undergo. I have never known a worker- 

 bee to survive a single year. Nothing in 

 the bee-business has given me more pleas- 

 ure than experimenting to ascertain the 

 different ages of bees and the different 

 offices they perform at certain ages when in 

 normal condition. When these conditions 

 are not complied with, the colony is thrown 

 out of balance, and the bees perform any 

 office of the hive feebly until they can adjust 

 matters. Then it is that very young bees 

 go into the fields when they will luring less 

 than one-half the load that the bees over 16 

 days old will carry. Old bees will rear 

 queens which are not of half the value of 

 those reared when there are plenty of nurse 

 bees, as is the case when a colony is in a 

 normal condition ; and some workers will 

 even lay eggs." 



"When worker-bees lay eggs, what kind 

 of bees come from them ?" 



"Nothing but drones. As these worker- 

 bees are not what we call fertile, nothing 

 but drones can come from their eggs, any 

 more than from an unfertile queen. Now, 

 while queens reared by old bees will become 

 fertile and lay for a time, their life is short. 

 In these exj^eriments I have found that 

 queens reared under the most favorable cir- 

 cumstances attain the age of three, four, 

 and often five years, even under the great 

 stimulus which is brought to bear on them 

 under our modern bee-keeping, where a 

 queen is often coaxed to lay more eggs each 

 year than did the queens of our fathers. 

 Many queens at the present time lay from 

 3000 to 4000 eggs daily; while in the day of 

 the box hive, if a qvieen laid from 2000 to 

 2500 eggs daily she was doing remarkably 

 well. On one occasion I had a queen that 

 lived and did good work until she was nearly 

 six years old, and many of my queens have 

 done good service until nearly or quite five 

 years old. On the contrary, I have reared 

 queens early in the si)ring or late in the fall, 

 and, with one or two experiments during 

 midsummer, with all old bees, which did 

 not live more than six months or a year; 

 while during their life-time they never kept 

 more than from four to six Langstroth 

 frames full of brood with all the coaxing I 

 could do. As a rule, neither all old bees nor 

 all very young bees rear queens unless some 

 accident happens to force them to do so. It 

 is not a good plan to adopt the accident pol- 



icy if one wishes to rear queens which will 

 tend to produce better bees than those we 

 already have. 



"The worker bee is in the egg form three 

 days; in the larval form, five or six days, 

 and in the pu)ia form twelve days. After 

 emerging it takes the bee from a half to a 

 full day to get fully straightened up, soon 

 after which it begins preparing chyle for 

 the larvie of the hive, doing this work very 

 largely until it is from six to ten days old, 

 when, if the weather is pleasant, it comes 

 out of the hive for the first time to avoid 

 the accumulated excreta, and to mark the 

 location of its home, still continuing its 

 work inside of the hive, such as feeding the 

 brood, building comb, evaporating nectar, 

 capping the brood and honey, etc., until it 

 is sixteen days old, when it goes out to labor 

 as a field-bee, after which, if the colony 

 continues in a normal condition, it does 

 very little of the inside work, and dies of 

 old age from 25 to 30 days later. While 

 these bees that are over 16 days old can be 

 forced, through being made queen less, to 

 prepare chyle and rear queens, still queens 

 so reared will work after about the same 

 order as will the workers at field-work, when 

 forced out after honey and pollen when only 

 five or six days old. Therefore, in all of our 

 work for increase outside of natural swarm- 

 ing, it is well so to form a colony that bees 

 of all ages will remain with each part of any 

 division made. This is as we always find it 

 with natural swarms, even to the smallest 

 of after-swarms. 



"The drone lives a very jjrecarious life; for 

 at any time, when a scarcity of honey pre- 

 vails, and the bees are not fed by the apiar- 

 ist, the drones are unmercifully driven from 

 the hive, sometimes being killed by the 

 workers. Under favorable conditions I find 

 that the life of the drone is nearly the same 

 as that of the worker. This I have proven 

 by keeping them in f[ueenless colonies, for 

 they will keep their drones as long as they 

 wovild natvrrally live. To queenless colo- 

 nies, drones are of greatest importance until 

 they can get a young laying queen. There 

 is another thing about drones that is very 

 rarely spoken about, and that is that they 

 are what is sometimes called 'commoners.' 

 In other words, they have the privilege of 

 entering, unmolested, any hive that allows 

 its own drones to remain, and if they are 

 driven from one hive they are allowed to 

 enter another which is retaining its drones. 

 Hence if some choice drones are being kept 

 in a queenless colony for mating queens 

 after all other drones are killed off, it is well 

 to have such a colony in an isolated posi; 

 tion ; otherwise, drones which are driven 

 from other colonies, and which have no 

 special value for breeding purposes, are 

 likely to enter with the choice drones, and 

 thus the late-reared queens will not be all 

 that might be desired." 



