American ^ae Journal 



July, 1909. 



of the very first trees in the fall to shed its 

 foliage. Then the leaves are so small and fine 

 that they don't litter up the bee-yard like 

 trees with large foliage. 



Rescue, Tex. L. B. Smith. 



Although I also prefer the mesquite 

 for shade, and have most of my apiaries 

 in groves of them, there are other places, 

 yea, many, many of them, where no mes- 

 quite ever grew, and could not be de- 

 pended upon for apiary shade. Besides, 

 the mesquite would be a slow grower, 

 and it would take too long before they 

 would be large enough for shading hives. 



Not so with this wild mulberry. Its 

 growth is rapid, and the trees soon at- 

 tain good height. In many places these 

 trees are relied on for fence-posts, and 

 thus their planting would in time serve a 

 double purpose. 



These trees resemble very much the 

 catalpas, which are very much planted 

 for post timber, and which could be 

 used in the same way for shading bee- 

 hives. While the shade is quite dense at 

 times, they leaf out late and defoliate 

 early, and are bare during the winter 

 so that the sun can strike in. 



Go For 



How Far Do Bees 

 Honey ? 



BY C. P. DADANT. 



The article by G. M. Doolittle on the 

 above-named subject in the June number 

 of the American Bee Journal is most 

 interesting to me, especially as the sarrie 

 subject was treated in the " Bulletin 

 Li Apiculture" (Swiss) at the same date, 

 by Dr. Crepieux, of Rouen, France, an 

 old apiarist and bee-writer, who was 

 for a number of years editor of the 

 ''Revue Internationale." The articles 

 evidence the uselessness of drawing any 

 conclusions from isolated experiments. 



Dr. Crepieux has an apiary of some 

 50 colonies of Italian bees in a country 

 which is stocked only with common bees. 

 He thus has very good opportunity of 

 recognizing his own bees, and of ascer- 

 taining the distance which they usually 

 cover in search of honey. With the use 

 of a bicycle on the fine roads of France, 

 he was able to investigate readily the 

 local conditions. He says : 



"I was struck by the fact that my bees were 

 much more fond of the northeast direction than 

 of the southwest, although there are as many 

 profitable fields in the one direction as in the 

 other. Here is my explanation of this fact. 

 The southwest winds are, in our region, those 

 that bring rain. For that reason the bees go 

 out less on the days when those winds are 

 blowing. When the weather is fine, the winds 

 from the east and the north bring the smell 

 of the fields situated in that direction, and the 

 bees go there. It may be also that they have 

 intelligence enough to go in that direction be- 

 cause they can go against the wind when 

 empty and come back with the wind when 

 loaded: in any event, those two reasons and 

 their practice tally and correspond with each 

 other. 



"In a westerly direction, I have never found 

 any of my bees beyond 500 meters (a third of 

 a mile). I must mention that we are limited 

 on that side by the forest. This forest extends 

 from south to north about 5 kilometers (over 3 

 miles). Its width is between 900 and 3,000 

 meters. My apiary is opposite the narrowest 

 part. An important detail is that the width of 

 the forest is guided by two very steep hill- 

 sides. The difference in level is about 60 

 meters (200 feet). I have never seen one of 

 my yellow bees on the other side of this for- 

 est. Yet there are fields of esparcet, campanu- 

 las and buckwheat, over there, and owing to 

 the direction of the slope, the crops there are 



a little later than here. I have seen my bees 

 cease to bring honey when the crops around 

 me were ended, when they might still have 

 found flowers on the other plateau. I, have 

 ascertained at those times that the fields in 

 nuestion were still visited by bees, but that 

 they were all of the common race, coming 

 irxjm an apiary with which I was acquainted. 



"I have also made a number of observations 

 to ascertain the distances traveled by my bees 

 in the other directions. In the southeast up 

 to 800 meters, I always saw the yellow bees. 

 At that spot the land has a slope of 8 or 10 

 meters and I have never noticed bees on the 

 other slope or 200 meters farther. On the 

 east and north the land is level, and as I have 

 stated, under the influence of the northeast 

 winds. It is in that direction that my bees 

 travel. On fine days they go in all direc- 

 tions, but any of my visitors notice at once 

 that half of the bees go to the northeast, the 

 rest of them spreading about to all other 

 points. Observations are easily made, as 48 of 

 the 56 hives are grouped in a house apiary. 

 The reader will probably wonder whether the 

 best fields are to the northeast. There are of 

 course important differences in the cultivation 

 from one year to another, but it is to the south- 

 east that the best fields are found. The others 

 are scattered in all directions. Last year, in 

 the northeast direction, nothing but cereals were 

 to be seen. I explored the region and found 

 a field of esparcet at 800 meters, it was cov- 

 ered with yellow bees. Another field, 150 

 meters farther, still showed some Italians. But 

 still farther, 1400 meters from my apiary, a 

 third field of esparcet did not show a single 

 Italian. In this same direction preferred by 

 the bees of my apiary there is a village, Bois- 

 Leveque, where I often have professional du- 

 ties. I have never gone there without examin- 

 ing the fields of blossoms. This village is 2200 

 meters from my apiary. I have never seen 

 there any of my Italians. 



**I have carried bees away from home, slight- 

 ly marked with flour on the wings and the 

 body. I have seen them come back when re- 

 leased at 600 .to 800 meters, but those which 

 were released at 2,000 to 3,000 meters did not 

 come home." 



In concluding his article, Dr. Cre- 

 pieux says that it is quite possible that 

 the circumstances in which his bees find 

 themselves may have influence on the 

 distance of flight. My own experience 

 would indicate that the shape of the 

 land has much to do with the flight of 

 bees. In "Langstroth Revised," the late 

 Mr. Chas. Dadant reports that he knew 

 bees to starve upon the hills in a year 

 of drouth, while the Mississippi River 

 low lands, less than 4 miles distant, 

 were yielding a large crop. This ex- 

 perience has again been reproduced since 



his day. But we must remember that 

 the country between the apiary in ques- 

 tion and the low lands is very much 

 broken and covered with patches of tim- 

 ber, orchards, fields of cereals, etc., all 

 unprofitable ground after the spring 

 days are over. 



Again, an apiary located on the banks 

 of the ^lississippi, which is a mile wide 

 at this point, never yielded as much 

 crop by about half as other apiaries 

 which were farther inland. We have 

 always ascribed this to the fact that 

 about half of the near-by pasture was 

 cut off by the river. We rarely see the 

 bees take the direction of the river. An 

 apiary situated in another spot near the 

 stream, located about 3 miles from the 

 lowlands of the Mississippi, in Missouri, 

 across the river, and which could not 

 be reached except by a bee-line of nearly 

 the entire distance over the water in a 

 longitudinal cross section, absolutely ig- 

 nored those low lands, during several 

 short crops, though those bottoms were 

 yielding a good harvest. 



In moving bees to distances of less 

 than a mile, we have seen many bees 

 return to the original spot unless great 

 precautions were taken, and even then 

 some would return if the moving was 

 done in the busy season. When moving 

 them 3 miles, very few returned. At 

 distances of five miles or more, we have 

 never seen bees return. But another 

 evidence of the influence of a stretch 

 of water as a barrier, is found in the 

 fact that at a distance of less than 3 

 miles across the Mississippi, the bees 

 moved never did return. 



Mr. Gaston Bonnier, professor at the 

 Sorbonne, Paris, author of "Cours Com- 

 plet d'Apiculture," and President of the 

 International Congress of Bee-Keepers 

 at Paris, in 1900, has lately reported 

 some experiments made by him on how 

 bees find their way home. He took 

 bees to the fields and painted their eyes 

 with blackened collodion, then turned 

 them loose after having marked them 

 so they could be recognized. These bees 

 returned home. From this he concludes 

 that bees have the sense of direction 

 apart from sight, and compares their 

 evident ability to return home to that of 

 the carrier pigeon. Bonnier locates the 

 "sense of direction" in the brain of both 

 bees and pigeons. 



That collodion experiment seems to 

 me rather indefinite. I would expect that 

 the secretion of their eyes similar to 

 that in our eyes would soon remove the 

 film thus artificially applied, and that 

 they would nevertheless use their eyes 

 to return home, for I cannot very well 

 imagine either a blind bee or a blind 

 pigeon returning home. I have, how- 

 ever, witnessed some very wonderful 

 feats by carrier pigeons. When I was a 

 child, I saw in our old city of France — 

 Langres — the flight of a hundred carrier 

 pigeons which had been brought on a 

 wager, from Brussels, Belgium, exactly 

 200 miles as the crow flies. These were 

 released from the top of the steeple of 

 our cathedral. They circled around, 

 rising higher and higher in the air. until 

 almost out of sight, then took a direct 

 flight towards their home, except half a 

 dozen or so that seemed unable to fol- 

 low, and returned to the steeple. I was 

 always under the impression that our 



