138 



THE AM E RFC Ay APIGULTURIST. 



she repeated once more, and returned 

 without meeting a drone, and went into 

 the hive. The day was cool, and par- 

 tially cloudy, with the sun shining inter- 

 mittently, and only a few drones were 

 flying. 



Then followed a week or more of 

 weather that bees flew scarcely any, and 

 when a warm day came I witnessed a 

 repetition of what I have described 

 above. This queen finally mated when 

 she was twenty-one days old, and turned 

 out to be a good layer. 

 ■ Testimony seems to be pretty strong 

 that drones do congregate, but why 

 should we assume that they go three or 

 four miles from the apiary to do so? 

 Some one may say, that is a provision of 

 nature to prevent in-and-in breeding, 

 but I should say that is assuming too 

 much. 



Do the males of quails and other gre- 

 garious fowls go miles away from the 

 covey with which they were reared, to 

 find a mate in pairing time ? or do they 

 choose a mate out of the flock they are 

 with? 



1 should say, keep plenty of Italian 

 drones and no black ones in your own 

 yard, and the greater part of your Italian 

 queens will be purely mated, if there are 

 no black drones reared nearer than two 

 miles from your apiary. 



Bluff ton, Mo. 



An article so full of practical sense as 

 the above seldom appears in any publi- 

 cation. The readers of the Api will re- 

 cognize in the article, the same line of 

 argument that we have been using for a 

 good many years. 



In our opinion no queens go a half 

 mile to meet a drone ; nor do we believe 

 drones go any farther from the apiary 

 than do the queens. We have watched 

 a good many virgin queens leave the 

 hives on the mating trip, and none were 

 absent mtire than five minutes. Now if 

 any.one desires to test the time a drone is 

 absent from the hive, just take a little 

 flour paste, made quite thin, or flour and 

 water, and when the drones come out 

 the hive, daub the backs of a few and 



see how long they are on the wing and 

 away from home. 



It was sometime within a year that 

 D. A. Jones expressed a good deal of 

 sympathy for such fellows as S. E. Mil- 

 ler and ourselves, because we do not 

 believe that queens and drones fly sever- 

 al miles in order to mate. 



D. A. Jones once kept his queens 

 on an island, some half dozen miles 

 from all other bees in order to insure 

 pure mating. Did he succeed? Well, 

 we had some of those same queens said 

 to have been mated so far from impure 

 drones ; they were far from pure, iiow- 

 ever. 



I claim that half a mile is as good 

 as ten miles so far as pure mating is 

 concerned. Those persons who so per- 

 sistently hold to their opinions that bees 

 must be kept three or more miles apart 

 to insure purity, and in the face of all 

 evidence to the contrary, are merely 

 cranks and it is not worth the time 

 wasted in discussing the question with 

 them. Mr. Miller is a clear-headed man 

 and should write more for bee-papers. 

 — Ed.1 



(From American Bee Journal, Aug. 11.) 



THE MATING OF QUEEN-BEES. j 



MIJS JENNIK ATCHI.KY. ''| 



I wish to relate a little circumstance 

 that happened not long since. 



I had quite a number of young queens 



to hatch a few weeks ago, and from • 



among them I confined a lot in the hives \ 



for five days, and kept them in the house, ! 



feeding them well each night. They i 



had two frames of brood and about one j 



pound of bees each. \ 



On the fifth day I took them to one i 



of my mating yards, 3 miles distant, at j 



about 4 o'clock in the evening. I put ^, 



them down and opened the entrances ' 



as I went, and just as soon as I had all ' 

 out of the wagon, I went back and ad- 

 justed the frames, and to my great sur- 

 prise every queen had mated and re- _ ' 

 turned. We saw one queen (whose 



