JUNE ]5, 1914 



CONVEMSATIONS WITH DOOLITTLE 



At Borodimo, New York« 



SURPLUS INCREASED TENFOLD, ETC. 

 I suppose I have been keeping bees in a crude 

 form, or in the old-fashioned way, for I have allowed 

 my bees to swarm naturally, hiving all prime swarms, 

 one in each empty hive, and doubling up after- 

 swarms till a fair colony was made. In this way I 

 have secured an average of fifty pounds from each 

 old colony in tlie spring, and supposed I was doing 

 fairly well until a few weeks ago an old man who 

 had been making a specialty of beekeeping for thirty 

 years told me that the surplus from any apiary could 

 be increased tenfold by allowing only one swarm. 

 from each colony. Now is that right? 



Without doubt the statement is exagger- 

 ated. It would seem that you can safely 

 count on fifty pounds of comb honey in a 

 good year from each good colony, and allow 

 them to swarm just as they please. With 

 one hundred good colonies, that would 

 amount to 5000 pounds. Now by allowing 

 only one swarm from each — which any act- 

 ive man could easily manage — if that 

 amount could be increased tenfold, or to the 

 amount of 50,000 pounds, the crop would be 

 worth, at ten cents a pound, $5000. Perhaps 

 this is something in which location " makes 

 all the difference in the world;" and if so it 

 would seem that the most of us must claim 

 a location much inferior to that in which 

 this specialist beekeeper lives. 



However, there is something in what yon 

 were told regarding restricting your swarms 

 to only one from each old colony in the 

 spring, where natural swarming is allowed. 

 In my early years I allowed the bees to 

 swarm as they desired ; but I soon found 

 out that, if any after-swarm left the parent 

 colony, all prospect of any surplus honey 

 from the parent colony went at the same 

 time, the prime swarm giving all the sur- 

 plus, as the after-swarm would do no more 

 than to build up for winter, as in the case 

 of the old colony. But by limiting the old 

 colony to just one prime swarm, the old 

 colony, if rightly managed, gives fully as 

 good a yield in surplus as the prime swarm. 

 In this way the colonies may be doubled 

 each year, and the surplus doubled as well. 



With the bad wintering which came to the 

 bees along in the eighties, this doubling 

 during the summer was quite a comfort to 

 the one who found his losses each winter to 

 average fifty per cent of what he had in the 

 fall ; while an average of 100 pounds of 

 comb honey for all of those ten years of the 

 eighties gave a zest to the beekeeper's life 

 not found in the fifty-pound yield. But the 

 days of swarms to be hived in separate hives 

 have seemingly passed by with the most of 

 our practical apiarists. By taking this 

 swarming matter in our own hands, swarms 



can be made at pleasure, or swarming be 

 done away with, and a yield above what 

 could be done by natural swarming brought 

 about. By retarding the desire of the 

 bees for natural swarming through putting 

 on a hive of combs until the yield is about 

 to come on from the flowers which give us 

 our surplus crop, and then placing this 

 upper hive of combs, now partly filled with 

 honey, by way of exchange for the lower 

 hive of brood, and then shaking all the bees 

 from their brood and the hiye containing it, 

 so that they run in to what was a few min- 

 utes ago their surplus apartment, great 

 results can be obtained in the sections, even 

 in a poor season. At time of shaking, 

 supers of sections are put on, and thus the 

 sections become the storage room, while the 

 honeycombs the bees were eagerly storing 

 in a few hours ago are being emptied to 

 give place for the eggs the queen will be 

 depositing in the cells as fast as the honey 

 from them is carried above. And that which 

 is coming in from the fields, mingled with 

 that which the bees are carrying up from 

 below, causes the sections to lae filled as by 

 magic, and all swarming is done away with. 



WHY BEES DO NOT LOSE THEIR STINGS WHEN 

 STINGING OTHER BEES. 



Another correspondent wishes me to tell 

 why bees when stinging other bees do not 

 lose or leave their sting, the same as they do 

 when stinging the beekeeper. From what I 

 myself have seen, a slight prick is all that 

 seems necessary to kill a worker-bee, the 

 sting not entering far enough so that any 

 of the barbs on the sting enter the wound. 

 This does not seem to hold good in the case 

 of the queen ; for on several occasions where 

 I have had queens stung in the thorax, 

 where the wings, legs, abdomen, or head is 

 attached, the sting was universally left. On 

 the other hand, most of those who have kept 

 bees for any length of time have noticed how 

 quickly a colony into whose hive a small 

 runaway swarm has come will dispatch that 

 swarm, without leaving a sting in a single 

 bee. An old beekeeper once told me that a 

 bee had to strike a person, as does a hornet, 

 in order to sting, otherwise she would not 

 sting at all. This hardly holds true; but 

 she needs the impetus motion gives her, or 

 something to hold her to the work, so to 

 speak. Certainly a '' laying hold " is neces- 

 sary for the bees to drive the sting into any 

 thing so that it will penetrate beyond the 

 barbs that are on it; and when penetrating 

 to such a depth, the sting must be left. 



