AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



305 



Bees Once IMarking a Location, 

 It Should IXot be Cliansred. 



Writteii for the American Bee Journa I 



BY G. M. DOOLITTLE. 



On page 820 of the American Bee 

 Journal for June 29th, 1893, I find, 

 in reply to a question asked by J. M. 

 Davis, regarding how the brood was to 

 be supplied with water when working 

 the Langdon non-swarming device, these 

 words: "Close the entrance of the 

 front, but have a hole bored in the back 

 of the hive; which hole will be easily 

 plugged when required. In that way 

 the working force will still go to the 

 other hive, while young bees will be able 

 to care for the brood." 



Like others, I have been wondering if 

 the brood must not suffer when working 

 hives on the Langdon plan, on account 

 of all the field-bees being shut from the 

 brood of one of the hives cdl of the time, 

 though each hive has these bees alter- 

 nately ; suffering not only on account of 

 water, but from lack of proper care, and 

 in a cold spell, from the requisite degree 

 of heat required for the best advance- 

 ment of the interior of the hive from 

 which the bees were excluded ; but I ob- 

 ject to having these matters regulated 

 as proposed above. 



Any one who has watched young bees 

 on their first flight knows that as they 

 go out at the entrance they turn around, , 

 heading toward the hive, viewing the 

 outside, then slowly rise on the wing, 

 describing circles, which enlarge with 

 each one that is farther from the hive, 

 till lost from sight. In this way the ex- 

 act location of their home, orthe entrance 

 or doorway to it, is marked, so that when 

 they return they know just where to 

 alight. Now move that doorway three 

 inches from where it was, while they 

 are gone, and you will see that they are 

 are bothered to a certain extent, and 

 will show it by hovering around for some 

 time before alighting. Move it one foot 

 to the right or left, and it will take 



them from five to ten minutes to find it. 

 Move it ten feet, and they will hardly 

 find it at all, unless their hive be the 

 only one in the near vicinity. 



After going from and to the hive 

 several times, their exact location be- 

 comes more and more fixed, so that a 

 bee which has been going to and fro 

 from a given point for a week will drop 

 at that point, or within an inch or two 

 of it, every time, and if the door has 

 been put in some other part of the hive 

 while she was gone, a confusion which 

 is almost painful is the result. If I am 

 right, Mr Langdon overcomes this with 

 his non-swarming device by the bees 

 traveling along on foot to the entrance 

 of the other hive, being led there by the 

 smell and homelike sound coming from 

 the same. But our "Montreal Sub- 

 scriber " proposes to allow the young 

 bees to go out at the rear of the hive, 

 through a hole, for a week or so, then 

 plug the hole so as to shut this doorway 

 up, thus causing not only the confusion 

 spoken of above, but the loss of all of 

 the bees which have thoroughly marked 

 that hole as an entrance to the hive. 



But I think I hear him saying that he 

 does not propose to plug the hole when 

 the bees are flying, but do it at night 

 when the bees are all in the hive. If 

 such are his thoughts, or those of any 

 one who reads this, I would reply that 

 after the entrance to the hive is once 

 thoroughly marked by a bee, that bee 

 never marks its location again except in 

 cases of swarming, long confinement to 

 the hive, or something that so disturbs 

 the colony as to cause each individual 

 bee to mistrust that something has gone 

 wrong, like their tree home in the woods 

 being blown over, or some great shake- 

 up, so as to throw them out of their 

 normal condition. Hence, as the colony 

 is not thrown out of a normal condition 

 when such a hole is plugged up, our bee 

 goes out where the light is seen, leaves 

 the alighting-board in a straight line, 

 gathers its load of honey and returns to 

 the old spot marked, perhaps weeks be- 

 fore, only to be lost unless the new 

 entrance is near enough to entice it 

 there. This was one of the things I had 

 to learn when I first began to keep bees, 

 and it is apparently about the hardest 

 thing to teach the ordinary individual. 



The older readers of the Bee Journal 

 will remember how E. Gallup worked 

 his twin hives, allowing the bees to 

 occupy one part of the hive during the 

 spring till that became filled with bees 

 and brood, when a slide was removed 

 from the partition separating the two, 

 the other part filled with empty combs 



