1905 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



1137 



Selser, as will be noted, was taking notes; 

 and, before he was aware of what was up, I 

 had my "revenge." 



DOING STUNTS WITH THE BEES BEFORE 

 A CROWD. 



BY W. E. FLOWER. 



I send you a few snap shots that were 

 taken in my apiary on June 3, at a meeting 

 of the Philadelphia Bee-keepers' Associa- 

 tion. The bees were handled without gloves, 

 smoke, or veil, nnd no one received a sting 

 but your humble servant, who accidentally 

 pinched a bee between his head and the hat- 

 bard when placing the hat, covered with 

 bees, upon his head. The bees were from 

 queens bought of Doolittle. The stunts 

 Were all done in the presence of thirty or 

 fort^' people— men, women, and children. 



Ashbourne, Pa. 



[W. E. Flower is an enthusiastic bee- 

 keeper, although his business is that of 

 making fine edged tools. He frequently 

 lectures on bees, U!?ing a stereopticon. and I 

 understand that he is already booking dates 

 for the winter. — Ed.] 



ITALIAN BEES, AGAIN. 



"Say, Doolittle, did you notice in the 

 October lfc.t GLhANiNGShow Editor Root had 

 you 'foul" on the way you mixed up 'varie- 

 ties,' 'pure stock,' and ' thoioughoreds '?" 



"Well, Jones, I presume it is likely I did 

 not make matters q lite as plain as I might. 

 Probably I srhould have u^ed the word race 

 to give the meaning expressed by pure 

 stock, using that word in the sense express- 

 ed by the Student's Standard Dictionary, as 

 'A variety so fixed as to be reproduced by 

 setd.' I entirely agree with Bro. Root in 

 what he sa>s m regard to species." 



"But is not that the same as Bro. Root 

 quotes from the Standard Dictionary as 

 'thoroughbn d ' ?" 



"It may appear so; but my idea of race 

 and thoroughbn d is that a certain race will 

 not sport but reproduce itself every time, 

 while a thoroughbred will sport more or less, 

 always. I do not have any thing but a copy 

 of the Standard Dictionary for Students, 

 which I su{'po^e is an abbreviation of the 

 Standaid In my Student's I read, under 

 the head of 'thoroughbred,' 'bred from the 

 best (r purest blood.' And this is the way 

 /take the matter." 



"Explain a little more fully." 



"Very well. Take the German (or black) 



bee. which 1 call a ^.red race— that is, a race 

 so fixed that it will reproduce itself every 

 time. I have tried the matter over and over 

 again, and any black queen of the sixties or 

 early seventies, or before the Italian bee 

 was introduced into these parts, would give 

 queens like herself, duplicates of herself as 

 to color, every one of them, no matter 

 whether you raised 10, 100, 1000, or 1,000,000 

 —all just exactly alike. Such is what I call 

 a 'fixed race,' or 'pure stock.' Now take 

 an Italian queen, one imported from Italy, 

 one of the best of such an importation, and 

 raise queens from her, and you do not have 

 to raise ten queens before you will find that 

 you have them varying in color all the way 

 from a maroon or leather color throughout 

 the whole length of the abdomen, to an abdo- 

 men striped with maroon and black, and some 

 with the whole abdomen as black as is the 

 abdomen of those black or German queens. 

 If a queen giving such a ring-streaked, speck- 

 led, and spotted queen progeny can be called 

 pure, or of a fixed race or type, then I am 

 at 'open sea' in this whole matter. I call 

 such queens thoroughbred in the sense of 

 those words from my Student's Standard 

 Dictionary ; they are bred from the best and 

 purest blood or stock they have in Italy." 



"But you don't think that others have 

 found so great a variation of color in the 

 queens from imported mothers as you de- 

 scribe, do you?" 



' ' If they have not, why have the prices 

 of imported queens been made to correspond 

 with their color ? Have you never had cir- 

 culars from those importing queens quoting 

 the selected— that is, the yellowest, of them 

 — for nearly or quite double the price of 

 those that were the darkest, with a price 

 about half way between for an average of 

 the lot?" 



"Yes, I must acknowledge that I have 

 read such circulars." 



"And this thing is only the bringing-up 

 again of the ' yellow-band ' matter which 

 was so thoroughly discussed during the 

 seventies. We were told at that time that 

 'no Chinese walls or snow- clad Alps' could 

 keep the bees in Italy from mingling with 

 other b'^'es in the country round about these 

 so-called pure Italians. It was fully proven 

 at that time that the Italians are not a pure 

 race, and yet the great mass of bee-keepers 

 have gone on calling them ' pure ' just the 

 same." 



' ' But the color of the queen progeny was 

 not given as the test, was it ?" 



"No. It was three yellow bands on the 

 workers. And the dissatisfaction ran so 

 high that, to meet the same, the ABC book 

 and Gleanings told how the bees from these 

 imported queens must be placed on a win- 

 dow, after first being filled with honey, in 

 order that they might show all three of the 

 yellow bands, and thus be told from the 

 ' two-banded ' hybrids. ' ' 



"That would be a good test, surely." 



"Do you think so ? Well, this helped me 

 to show that the poorest specimen of these 

 two-banded hybrids, as they were called, 



