THE AMERlCAl^ BEE JOURNAL. 



167 



entirely. The queen-reariug impulse 

 is the natural desire of the bees to 

 preserve and perpetuate their individ- 

 ual existence as a colony. 



In what respect does Mr. D's 

 method differ practically from that of 

 our most successful queen-breeders y 

 In the one case Mr. D. forces his 

 colonies up to the strongest position 

 in point or numbers that he possibly 

 can, and then allows them to swarm ; 

 tlie others force theirs up to the same 

 point and then remove the queen. 

 This, however, is not the whole. Mr. 

 D. allows his colonies to rear queens 

 as they may choose, thus running the 

 chance of getting many from aged 

 larvEe ; the others, when they remove 

 the queen, remove all brood that could 

 be used to rear queens from, and con- 

 tinue so removing until all the residue 

 is too old to be so used. Then all 

 queen-cells are removed, and eggs- 

 fresh eggs— are given the colonies. 

 Xow these colonies are as strong as 

 they can be made. If honey is not 

 being gathered freely, they are fed to 

 keep up the illusion, and the desire to 

 rear a queen for the purpose of per- 

 petuating the colony is equally as 

 strong as the swarming impulse ; why, 

 then, should the results in the one 

 case be so much better than in the 

 other y 



No one would pretend to say that 

 Mr. Doolittle would use the idea of 

 " swarming impulse " for purposes of 

 deception. It is a fact, though, that 

 some do so use it, and such being the 

 case, I do not see anything " uncharit- 

 able or uncourteous" in the replies 

 adverted too. The real fact is that in 

 bee-keeping matters there has always 

 been a large amount of mystery, and 

 theories more or less plausible have 

 been accepted in the past as proven 

 facts ; so long as such is the case, just 

 so long will the door to fraud be left 

 open. Let us all indulge in the hope 

 that facts, and not theories, will be 

 the rule of the future, and that every 

 man will be judaed for what he does, 

 and not by any general standard. 



Foxboro,o Mass. 



For the American Bee JoumaL 



Wlio Slionli Keep Bees ? 



MRS. L. HARRISON. 



On page 23 Mr. Otis K. Baldwin 

 says : " During the year 1883 bees 

 did well here, as was universally the 

 case. This is what I call a bad streak 

 of good luck, or vice versa, for it gave 

 everybody the bee-fever— the old men, 

 the boys, the cripples, the old maids, 

 and even the hired girls in this sec- 

 tion entered upon the uncertain sea 

 of apiculture." 



"The old men:" God bless 'em. I 

 once had a dear old father, and a 

 grandfather, too ; the idea of any one 

 begrudging them the comfort of keep- 

 ing bees in their old age ! 



" The boys :" Friend Otis, thee was 

 a boy once ; thee might be called over 

 the "dark river" to hive bees in 

 another clime, and would it not be 

 well to have them learn to care for 

 bees y When thou art gone, North- 



eastern Missouri will be their ter- 

 ritory, and they will not be infringing 

 on thy rights. 



" The cripples :" I know a house- 

 builder who became crippled so that 

 he could not climb upon buildings 

 any more ; he must Uveas well as you 

 and I, and he engaged in bee-keeping. 

 He has limped among his hives to 

 good advantage, and sends to this 

 market beautiful honey, and if I 

 should meet him to-dayi would grasp 

 him warmly by the hand, and say : 

 "My brother bee-keeper, although 

 you live 20 miles from Peoria, you are 

 welcome to this honey market, as far 

 as I'm concerned." 



" The old maids :" True, their cats 

 might follow them into the apiary and 

 get stung, yet I know some ladies " of 

 uncertain age " in the State of Michi- 

 gan who have made a grand success 

 of keeping bees, and I nope that the 

 " old maids " of Northeastern Mis- 

 souri will succeed just as well. 



" The hired girls :" That hired girls 

 are keeping bees is the choicest bit of 

 news I've heard in many a year, and 

 I roll it " as a sweet morsel under my 

 tongue." They have gotten up from 

 their knees, and left their scrubbing- 

 brushes, and stove-blacking,and stand 

 erect in their apiaries. When attend- 

 ing the bee-convention at Detroit, I 

 roomed with a " hired girl "—a neat, 

 intelligent girl (not an old maid), who 

 had done house work in order to earn 

 money to purchase bees. She had a 

 nice little apiary, and was then work- 

 ing, and obtained leave of absence 

 for a few days to attend the conven- 

 tion. I won't tell her name, for fear 

 some lazy man might think she would 

 be a good investment. 



I want women to keep bees, or, as 

 Mr. B. says, " enter upon the un- 

 certain sea of apiculture ;" but I do 

 not want them to crowd out the men. 

 I know that we take up considerable 

 room, and we are noisy, too, always 

 putting in a word, but we will try to 

 keep " on our good behavior." 



Peoria,© Ills. 



For tlie American Bee JoumaL 



The New Reversilile Hiye. 



G. M. ALV^ES. 



In a recent article I propounded 

 several questions concerning the con- 

 struction of the new Heddon hive. 

 Mr. Furness has given us his answers 

 to the questions, and as it seems that 

 he has somewhat misunderstood the 

 purpose of them, I take this oppor- 

 tunity to explain. 



In asking the questions I directly 

 stated that I did so without offering 

 answers myself. Serious doubts arose 

 in my mind, in reading Mr. Ileddon's 

 book, as to some of the details of con- 

 struction, and it would have been 

 manifestly unreasonable for one, from 

 experiments carried on for a short 

 time, and only within the chambers 

 of his own mind, to pit his conclu- 

 sions against those of men who had 

 carried on their experiments for the 

 last year or two in outward fact. 

 Hence the questions were intended to 



raise the points, and not to decide 

 them. 



I thought then, and still think now, 

 that at least some of these points 

 should be met by Mr. Heddon or some 

 one else wlio has tested the hive ; and 

 I now ask Mr. ileddon, lias he had no 

 trouble in making and keeping the 

 frames of the precise width ? Has he 

 not been troubled with expansion and 

 contraction V and has not the accumu- 

 lation of propolis given him trouble 

 at the tops of the frames where they 

 touch, or nearly touch the front and 

 rear of the case, and also at the joints 

 made by the frame, on the thumb- 

 screws' side, with the front and rear 

 of the case ? 



It is to be understood that an im- 

 pediment longitudinally of only 1-16 

 of an inch will prevent the replacing 

 of a frame, and that an expansion of 

 or an accretion to each frame of 1-32 

 of an inch will take up all of his spare 

 room. Let Mr. Heddon please tell us 

 to what extent these objections are 

 founded in fact, and to what extent 

 in imagination. 



I will state here, and probably it 

 would have been better to have stated 

 it in my former article, that Mr. Hed- 

 don'a system seems to me in many 

 respects excellent, and if there are 

 real objections in his present details 

 of construction, I have sufficient faitti 

 in his inventive genius to believe that 

 he will succeed in removing them. 



But I am necessitated to explain 

 further. Mr. Furness, after having 

 been pleased to mention my prelimi- 

 nary remarks as of literary merit, etc., 

 intimates that I am very non-progres- 

 sive. Now it is somewhat embar- 

 rassing to have attempted to say 

 funny things, and then feel called 

 upon to explain them. The fact was, 

 Mr. Ileddon's new hive was ushered 

 into bee-literature with such a flourish 

 of trumpets, and at the same time 

 Mr. Heddon had so wonderfully 

 crossed his old records, that some of 

 us could not but laugh for the fun of 

 the thing. 



However, the subject has now as- 

 sumed an aspect not to be laughed at. 

 The question has been raised, is the 

 Ileddon patent valid V We are now 

 called upon to consider the rights of 

 a man to property claimed by him. It 

 is probably unnecessary to say here 

 that I am no champion of Mr. Hed- 

 don's, appointed or self-constituted, 

 but surely all fair men should ever be 

 ready to champion fair play, it mat- 

 ters not whose interests are involved. 

 I have never seen Mr. Heddon's 

 speciBcations for his patent, but it 

 requires little intelligence to know 

 that the spirit of his claims includes 

 not only his several precise details of 

 construction, but that it also includes 

 a combination of these details into 

 his special system, and all kindred 

 details that have for their end the 

 carrying out of his particular system. 

 I lay down the above as a proposition 

 that no man will deny who can think 

 connectedly. 



The question, then, is not merely 

 whether all of Mr. Heddon's details 

 are novel, but the question also is, 

 whether the combination of these 

 details into his peculiar system is 



