?,24 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTUEE. 



July 



or not. I have been keeping bees for the last twen- 

 ty years, but at any rate I am ready to make my 

 <nvn-np. Until this year I have never known any 

 thing about dwindlina-, except what I have read. 

 This sprino-, however, a number of colonies were 

 very weak, and, in spite of all my nursing and feed- 

 ing, stayed weak, and gradually grew weaker. I 

 watched thera carefully to see if I could And out 

 what the trouble was. Were the queens at fault'? 

 Hardly, for thej' laid cgg5 in more space than the 

 bees could cover, and in some cases t^wo or three 

 eggs in a cell; and subsequent events proved that 

 at least some of them were good queens. Gradually 

 the queens began to be missing, and I concluded to 

 double up. In one case I united 12 of them in one, 

 saving the queens. This I certainly thought would 

 make a fair colony; but, would you believe it? in a 

 few days it seemed just as weak as any one of them 

 had been singly. They had a little patch of brood 

 two or three inches square in two combs, sometimes 

 in three; and so long as I gave them no help in the 

 way of young brood or bees, their patch of brood 

 seemea to diminish rather than increase. It looked 

 a little as if they were all old bees, and either could 

 not or would not take proper care of the brood. I 

 kept along 9 of them till the latter part of May, and 

 th<^n, by giving sealed brood or young bees, they 

 picked up heart and showed the queens to be gord. 



Since writing the above I have read in A B C about 

 dwindling, and am not so certain that mine was the 

 regular affair. At any rate, I know that in future, 

 if I have any very weak colonies in the spring, I 

 shall not try to nurse them along for the sake of 

 saving the queens, but do as I did with a few this 

 year. I shall unite them with good colonies, not 

 ■with other dwindlers; cage the queens and give 

 them to a good colony to care for till I can taki' a 

 frame or two of brood and bees from flourishing 

 colonies to form a nucleus for each queen. The col- 

 ony that Is caring for these caged queens" must also 

 have its own queen caged, for I lost a nice queen by 

 allowing her to remain free in a hive where othei's 

 were caged. 



In caging the qvieens I ran short of cages, and pvit 

 two queens in one cage. They stayed together in 

 the same cage several days without molesting each 

 other, and each one now presides in a flourishing 

 colony. Do old queens ever fight? 



I have just been out to look at my Cyprian and 

 Holy-Land queens, raised by you or neighbor H., in. 

 troduced 3 or 4 days ago, and they are doing nicely. 

 They commenced laying within 24 hours after they 

 were put in the hives. The Cyprian is a handsome 

 bird, and the Holy-Land, although not of so hand- 

 some color, is of beautiful form. As I looked at 

 them and thought that, only a few days,— indeed, 

 not many liourg, before,— they had been hundreds of 

 miles away, and were now perfectly at home in their 

 new domicils, I thought of the various strides in bee 

 culture, and said to myself, " What further advance 

 may we not expect in the next ten years?" 



Marengo, 111., June 13, 1881. C. C. Miller. 



Your plan for making the bees care for 

 empty combs, friend M.. is an excellent one ; 

 but it seems to me that, to do it quickly and 

 to advantage, you need those same movable- 

 bottom hives you said you would not have 

 about, last month, The idea is similar to 

 the one I employed in having the bees take 

 care of a hive when the combs liad fallen 



down. Put a good set of combs above the 

 melted-down mass, with brood in one or 

 more of them, and the bees will carry all the 

 honey from the crushed combs above, and 

 then you can straighten out and fix them 

 back in the combs. — Your experience in 

 uniting, to save dwindling colonies, agrees 

 with what Doolittle wrote a short time ago, 

 and, I guess, with the experience of the 

 most of us. — Yes, the old queens will tight. 

 I have caged them on purpose to see how 

 they would manage. If you kept two in one 

 cage for several days, you have demonstra- 

 ted some thing new," I believe. This reminds 

 me. that a few years ago a friend in Michi- 

 gan declared we sent him a cage without a 

 queen in it, and two queens in the accom- 

 panying cage. I told him it was an impos- 

 sibility, for, even had we been so awfully 

 careless, it was impossible for them to live 

 thus through the trip. If he sees this, will 

 he ])lease accept my apologyV He may have 

 been right, after all. 



^ ■»■ 



APIS BORS.I.TA! 



CAPTURED AT LAST) 



^I^^P^E copy the following from the Ceylon 

 ^M Obserrer, of Friday evening, April 8, 

 ^ -^ 18S], which we presume was sent us 

 by our friend Frank himself:— 



CEYLON BEES: 



COLOXIES OF "APIS DORSATA," THE MOST WONDER- 

 FUL BEE IN THE WCIKLD. TAKEN BY MR. BEN- 

 TON IN THE KURUNEGALA JUNGLE. 



We are glad to say that Mr. Benton has at length 

 been successful in capturing the "Apis dorsata " 

 (Sinhalese "Bamhara"), which he describes as " the 

 most wonderful bee in the world." Mudiliyar Jaye- 

 tellike secured a party of Sinhalese bee-hunters who 

 guided Mr. Benton to the Bambara^^ala, a mountain 

 rock some 30 miles from Kuruncgala in the jungle, 

 and there, after a very interesting and exciting ex- 

 perience, which Mr. Benton will probably relate 

 for the benetlt of our readers, two colonies of the 

 '• dor,sata" were secured. So much importance does 

 Mr. Benton attach to his work here, now that he has 

 seen this bee, a splendid honeymaker, that he is to 

 postpone his departure to Cyprus for another fort- 

 night, returning to Kurunegala to-morrow morning. 

 He has left specimens of the new bee in spirits which 

 can be seen at our olHce. The Sinhalese were much 

 astonished to see the way in which Mr. Benton han- 

 dled bees which, wrongly used or blown upon, are so 

 savage that they will pursue the otfenders great dis- 

 tances, and Mr. Jayetilleke declares that he has got 

 more practical information about bees from Mr. 

 Benton in a week than he had from all other sources 

 in many years. 



Very gDod; but, friend 13.. why in the 

 world don't you tell us plainly whether they 

 are really an inch long, and that their stings 

 are good for toothpicks V 



Later:— From another part of the paper 

 mentioned, we find the following: — 



Bamhara (Apis dorsata) is a large bee prettily 

 marked with yellow and black, and makes a very 

 large quantity of honey, varying from two to three 

 gallons. It constructs its hive, a large thick comb 

 about 3'/4x2'i feet, in a peculiar shape, attaching it 

 to the branches of very lofty forest trees, or secur- 

 ing it to the ledges of high rocks with its two ends 

 fastened up, and a narrow opening in the middle be- 

 tween the branch or rock which supports it. It is 

 with great difficulty got at by bee-hunters, and only 

 by those used to such kind of work. I have never 

 heard of any attempts being made by natives to do- 

 mesticate them like the common honey-bee of Cey- 

 lon, and it is my impression that any amount of ex- 

 ertion to domesticate them will prove fruitless. , 

 Kana Veua is a tiny bee belonging to the Trigoiuv, 



