590 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULX«51iE 



CONVERSATIONS with DOOLITTLE 



At Borodino, 



CHILLED BEES, ETC. 



" On page 416, May 15, Henry 

 S. Bohon says he found a colony 

 of bees starved out with a temper- 

 ature of 10 below freezing, with 

 the bees apparently dead. He 

 brought the colony to the house 

 where the warmth and a sprinkling of 

 warm syrup brought all the bees to life. 

 I never Avas able to bring a bee back to life 

 after it had been frozen. It seems to me 

 that 10 below freezing should freeze bees." 

 It will be noted that Mr. B. lives in 

 Virginia, and undoubtedly on a spring 

 morning the temperature could be 10 below 

 freezing, and the bees inside the hive on the 

 bottom-board not be frozen, as the hive and 

 the warmth from the ground below would 

 keep them from the frost of an early 

 morning. Several times in my 40 years' 

 experience I have brought individual bees 

 and whole colonies back to life under simi- 

 lar cireuinstanc^s. My first experience along 

 this line was about 55 years ago, when as a 

 boy in roaming the woods in the maple- 

 sugar season I heard bees in flight. Look- 

 ing up I located a colony of bees on their 

 cleansing flight from a tree. The sun was 

 shining bright, but the air was cool, so that 

 some of the bees fell on the snow in the 

 shade and became chilled. That night it 

 rained all night, but kept mild for two or 

 three days more. Father rather doubted my 

 flnding a bee-tree, and three days later I 

 passed that place again. Having a little box 

 in my pocket I picked up about a dozen of 

 the " bedraggled dead bees," put them in 

 the box, and the box in my inside vest pock- 

 et. Arriving home I took the box out to 

 prove to father that I had found a bee-tree. 

 On pulling out the box a buzzing was heard 

 inside, and on opening it before a window 

 every bee flew to the light. 



In later years I tried chilling bees by 

 shaking them on the snow near dark with a 

 temperature of 35 to 40, then, gathering 

 thera up, putting them in the cellar wberp 

 a temperature of 40 degrees was maintain- 

 ed, dreaming that whole colonies might be 

 kept in a " hibernating state " by some such 

 scheme; but from ten days to two weeks 

 was all I could get, even when the bees had 

 been made to fill themselves with honey. 



On page 425, June 1, I see that Editor 

 Root thinks that " a sudden chilling kills 

 them." I do not believe that the sudden- 

 ness has anything to do with the matter. 

 The editor mentions " a zero atmosphere." 



New York 



One of his slowly chilled bees would suc- 

 cumb in such an atmosphere just as quickly, 

 for on the freezing of the juices of the bee 

 that bee dies just as surely as if " crushed 

 under the foot of man." It is in the 

 freezing that the life goes out. 



TIME FOE THE EMERGING OF QUEENS. 



" Dr. Miller and H. H. Root, p. 427, June 

 1, are having a scrap over the time it takes 

 for the emerging of the perfected queen 

 from the time the ^gg is placed in a queen- 

 cell by the mother queen. Which is right?" 



Perhaps Dr. Miller will accuse me also of 

 going by traditions; but it was in the year 

 1869 that I read from Moses Quinby that 

 the queen is in the Qgg form 3 days, in the 

 larval form 6 days, and in the pupa form 

 7 days, or 16 days from the egg to the per- 

 fect queen. He said that cool weather, to 

 a certain extent, prolongs the time, and hot 

 weather shortens it a little ; but for all prac- 

 tical purposes, 16 days is quite dependable. 

 Now, when the bees are becoming somewhat 

 sluggish thru a desire to settle down for 

 their winter nap I have known queens to 

 take 18 and 19 days in perfecting. Then in 

 the excitement and bustle of the swarming 

 season, with the mercury soaring up in the 

 nineties the most of the time, I have had 

 queens emerge in only 15 days and two or 

 three hours; but I have never known of a 

 single queen emerging in as short a time as 

 15 days. In most of the short-time queens 

 they have been proven to be such as are 

 held in their cells by the bees after they are 

 mature, when the figi;ring is done with 

 swarming colonies. Bear in mind that a 

 queen at maturity is as white and weak as 

 any worker when it begins to gnaw the 

 capping of its cell, and a newly matured 

 queen cannot fly any more than can a newly 

 matured worker. Such white weak queens 

 do not push the covers off their cells and 

 fly off while you are cutting the queen-cells 

 off the combs, as we are told hatching 

 queens often do. 



HONEY IN CELLS CONTAINING EGGS. 



Dr. Miller, on this same page, says that 

 Arthur C. Miller has " a new one " on him 

 in saying that " bees sometimes put honey 

 in a cell that contains an egg." I do not 

 now have A. C. M.'s article where I can 

 turn to it, but I have known bees having 

 laying workers that put both eggs and hon- 

 ey in embryo queen-cells, and to a certain 

 extent in drone-cells, but not in worker- 

 cells. 



