JANUARY 1, 1914 



Stray Stravrs 



Db. 0. 0. Miller, Marengo, 111. 



Happy New Year! 



Hey ! Mr. Editor, you nearly arg\;ed me 

 into painting hives. After reading Doolit- 

 tle, p. 842, I'll let 'em stay unpainted. 



I claim only part credit for the 266 sec- 

 tions per colony, 1913. Most of the work 

 was done by a woman — a hustler — Miss 

 Emma W. Wilson. 



C. r. Bender's article on European foul 

 brood, p. 897, sliows plainly he's been there. 

 The most comforting item is that he has not 

 seen a foul cell for three years, and yet he 

 has kept his old combs. 



L. S. Edison, you ask, p. 864, whether to 

 put frames of foundation in the center or 

 side of the brood-chamber in April. You 

 can do either ; but the best place is to leave 

 them in the shop till a month or two later. 



A SPECIAL advantage of the motor-truck 

 for out-apiaries is that your symj^athies are 

 not drawn upon as with horse flesh, when 

 you want to hurry home without stopping 

 to rest, or crowd two days driving into one. 



Lately a man told me that the bees in 

 the middle of the cluster in his hives fanned 

 lively to get up heat when too cold. Is that 

 the orthodox belief? [That is certainly not 

 the orthodox belief, and, what is more, we 

 do not believe it is true. — Ed.] 



A. I. Root, after reading what you say, 

 p. 911, I feel proud to say that, with a 

 single exception, I have found the toilet 

 rooms of all the public institutions in Wash- 

 ington scrupulously neat and clean. More- 

 over, lavatories are furnished with hot and 

 cold water, soap, and individual paper tow- 

 els, entirely free. 



J. E. Crane has my thanks for sometliing 

 I never saw before — a piece of comb with 

 worker-cells on one side, five to the inch, and 

 drone-cells on the other side, four cells mea- 

 suring 11/^ inches. A plain case, with no 

 bend in the septum. [This is quite a re- 

 markable ease. Has any one else seen any 

 thing like it?— Ed.] 



, You never can count on weather. At 

 Medina you were caught Nov. 9 with hives 

 3 feet under snow. I was caught the other 

 way. Nov. 11 I left home feeling that the 

 bees were safe in the cellar ; but immediate- 

 ly a warm spell turned up, such as never 

 was known before, and I almost dread to 

 learn what shape I'll find the bees in when 

 I reach home Dec. 19. 



In American Bee Joiirnal for 1861, 17 

 days is given as the time from the laying of 



the egg to the emergence of the young queen. 

 That was, I think, on the authority of 

 Dzierzon and Berlepsch, and was, pretty 

 surely, from rearing queens in not very 

 strong nuclei. Later, 16 days was counted 

 the time — 3 days in the egg, 6 days feeding, 

 and 7 days sealed up. I think those are 

 the generally accepted figures to-day, and 

 they are so given, Gleanings, p. 567. But 

 Cowan, and later the A B C and X Y Z, 

 reduced the days of feeding to 5, making 

 the time from the egg to virgin 15. In order 

 to learn something about it from the bees 

 themselves I made some experiments, not 

 with nuclei, but with a full force of bees. 

 I got some positive results, although not 

 very exact. In one case, instead of 9 days 

 from the laying of the egg to sealing, it was 

 not more than 7 days, 20 hours, 45 minutes, 

 with a possibility of a good bit shorter time. 

 (In the course of the years I have seen so 

 many small larvae in sealed cells "that I am 

 inclined to believe that cells are often sealed 

 after four days of feeding or less. I sus- 

 pect that the bees are not very particular 

 about the time of sealing up; but at any 

 time after an abundance of pap has been 

 placed in the cell, whether the time be more 

 or less, they say, " There, now, you little 

 pig, you have more than you can cram 

 down, and you may as well be sealed up 

 now as any time.") In this ease the full 

 time from egg to virgin could not have been 

 more than 4 hours over 15 days, with a pos- 

 sibilitj' of being more than 4 hours under 

 that time. 



Aug. 5, 3:05 p. m., I gave a comb to my 

 best queen, and after 2 hours gave it to 

 queenless bees. Aug. 19 I put the 4 cells in 

 a nursery. Aug. 20, at 1 :05 P. M., no queen 

 was out of its cell. At 3 :05 one was out. 

 At 5 no other was out, but another was out 

 at 6 :10. I did not look again till next 

 morning at 5 :15, when I found the remain- 

 ing two were out. The longest possible 

 time of that first queen was exactly 15 days, 

 with a probability of 2 hours less, and a 

 possibility of 4 hours less. The time of that 

 second queen ranged from 55 minutes less 

 than 15 days to 3 hours 5 minutes more 

 than 15 days. The two remaining queens 

 must have been at least a few minutes long- 

 er, but there's no telling how much longer. 



Here's a chance for some of you ambi- 

 tious youngsters to give us some more exact 

 figures. Get your eggs laid witliin a shorter 

 period than two hours, and then make more 

 frequent observations than I did. 



