42 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



January, 1920 



GLEANED by ASKING 



Icna Fowls 



QUESTION.— 

 I have a few 

 colon ies of 

 bees, and 

 each has over 40 

 pounds of honey 

 for vi'inter use. I 

 have some unfinish- 

 ed frames of honey 

 that I intended to 

 give them in the 



spring. Is sugar syrup better for brood-reaving 

 than natural stores? If so at what time would it 

 be best to start to feed? I have about 100 old bass- 

 wood trees around where I live, so I would like to 

 have the colonies as strong as possible for the bass- 

 wood. John Arbtin. 

 Iowa. 



Answer. — There is nothing so good for 

 brood-rearing as natural stores. Sugar syrup 

 is all right as a winter food, but is not as 

 good as honey for brood-rearing, in the 

 spring; nor do we recommend stimulative 

 feeding in the spring, altho a few good au- 

 thorities such as Alexander have recom- 

 mended it in the past. As long as your colo- 

 nies are kept strong and supplied with a 

 good queen and plenty of stores, they will 

 breed in the spring and supply you with 

 plenty of workers in time for the harvest. 



Question. — I send you under separate wrapper 

 a sample, number 223, of honey. "Will you examine 

 it and let me know if you think it is pure honey 

 and if it would be safe to feed to my bees for win- 

 ter stores? It is so different from our honey that I 

 am fearful I might lose my bees. 



Kentucky. S. C. Kirkpatrick. 



Answer. — We have not had an analysis 

 made of the honey, but we should say from 

 the taste of it that it is not adulterated with 

 glucose. If glucose were present the mix- 

 ture would be thicker than shown in the 

 sample. If it were adulterated with sugar 

 syrup, that would not hurt it for feeding 

 bees — it would be all the better. You, of 

 course, know, however, that feeding honey 

 of any kind to bees — unless you know its 

 source — is attended with a great deal of 

 danger from foul brood, and the only thing 

 you can do is to boil it for 15 minutes in a 

 closed vessel, being careful in the mean- 

 time that it does not boil over. Such hon- 

 ey when fed to bees is not suitable for win- 

 ter food where the bees cannot have a 

 flight at least once a week. In your climate 

 we would be of the opinion that the bees 

 would fly often enough to prevent dysentery. 

 The quality of the honey is very good, and, 

 if you know it came from a locality where 

 there is no bee disease, you" could feed it 

 without boiling; but in order to do this it 

 would be best to thin it with a little water. 

 Question. — Tlie following is clipped from "The 

 Chri-stian Herald" of Oct. 25: 



" It seems that the old song about the busy bee 

 has been a flagrant imposition on a confiding people. 

 As a matter of fact, the government experts have 

 found that about half the bees have been confirmed 

 loafers and have been getting jobs caring for baby 

 bees just to escape real work. Not being able to rea- 

 son with the idlers, the experts have taken strong' 

 means to rectify matters. They found they couldn't 

 take a single bee out and argue him into working, 

 so they have reconstructed the hives .so tliat it is a 



case of work or 

 starve. By careful- 

 ly studying the 

 habits of the insects 

 it was discovered 

 that a hive could be 

 made which would 

 permit the care of 

 the infant bees by 

 just a few of the 

 adults where here- 

 tofore nearly half the able-bodied individuals were 

 escaping work by playing nurse. In the new hives 

 (he government finds that out of 40,000 bees, former- 

 ly divided equally between nurses and honey-mak- 

 ers the honey -makers are in a great majority. This 

 increased efficiency last year not only took care of 

 a large growth in honey consumption in the United 

 States but made it possible to increase the export 

 fifteen times." 



I find after reading it three times, that my mind 

 is in a mingled condition of amusement, incredulity, 

 and wonder. Would like to see comment in Glean- 

 ings on tl'.e same. S. C. Lord. 

 California. 



Answer. — The article is a misleading one. 

 There is already so general an ignorance 

 concerning bees that it seems a great pity 

 to increase such ignorance by foisting this 

 sort of stuff on the public thru religious and 

 other papers. It is true that colonies do 

 sometimes loaf because they have not suf- 

 ficient room in the brood-chamber or in the 

 supers. In such a case a larger hive would 

 remedy the matter. Sometimes colonies also 

 loaf because of a poor queen. If the queen 

 is replaced with one from a better working 

 strain, the bees will seem much more indus- 

 trious. The present tendency in hives is 

 toward a larger rather than a smaller hive; 

 so we hardly see how reconstructing the 

 hives would cause the bees to "work or 

 starve, ' ' for there is really more chance of 

 the colonies starving when the hive is small 

 than when it is large. Moreover, the gov- 

 ernment has no corner on large hives. When 

 good Italian bees fail to work it is be- 

 cause the colony is diseased, the queen is in 

 some way defective, or there is no nectar 

 in the fields. But even when bees do for 

 any of these reasons fail, they are not play- 

 ing off by acting as nurses. That is fiction, 

 pure and simple. We might also add that 

 neither the government nor any one else 

 has been able during the past year to change 

 the habits of the bees to such an extent as 

 to increase the export of honey 15 times. 



Question. — If there are many conditions under 

 which queens may be successfully introduced by 

 simply dropping them on the combs, please state 

 \\hat are these conditions. Philip D. Bishop. 



Nova Scotia. 



Answer. — We have sometimes used the 

 fasting method with success after making 

 the colony queenless for from 84 to 48 hours. 

 Tlie queen to be introduced is left without 

 attendants and with nothing to eat for about 

 45 minutes, then the hive is opened very 

 gently so that hardly a bee knows that the 

 hive has been touched. We prefer to have 

 a cai])et, instead of the cover, over the top 

 of the hive, when introducing in this way. 

 We simply raise the corner of the carpet 



