1698. 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



613 



boll. The spores were not all killed until aTter 45 minutes. 

 Dr. Howard's concluding words on this point are " that boil- 

 ing for an hour would destroy their vitality." 



•Still later I saw a report of experiments upon the same 

 point. I am sorry to say I cannot say where, but I think 

 they were experiments made under the auspices of the Cana- 

 dian government, and reported in the Canadian Bee Journal. 

 If my memory does not play me false, spores grew after being 

 kept at the boiling-point nearly two hours and a half. 



Under the circumstances I would not feel justified in ad- 

 vising less than 2}.2 hours boiling. Even if 15 minutes is 

 sufficient, 23^ hours is still safe, and Dr. Howard's experi- 

 ments lead to the belief that in at least some cases 15 minutes 

 time is not sufficient. McHenry Co., III. 



The Queen-Excluder aud Its Inventor. 



BY P. 6REINEK. 



In his Straws for July 15, Dr. Miller makes mention of 

 the inventor of the queen-excluder, Fr. A. Hanuemann 

 (wrongly spelled Hahnnemann). This brings to my mind 

 vividly what Mr. H. wrote in the German papers during the 

 years 1875, '78, '79, about this invention and the general 

 management of his bees ; and altho about 20 years have past 

 since then, what he said may still be of interest to the readers. 



If my memory serves me aright, nothing has ever ap- 

 peared in relation to the subject in our bee-literature here, so 

 I will speak of Mr. Hannemann, try to give the essentials of 

 his management, and mingle with it some facts and the ex- 

 periences of others as opportunity may present. 



When Mr. Hannemann wrote his last report for the 

 Bienen-Zeitung, in 1879, he was then a bee-keeper of 30 

 years' experience. He had made a specialty of apiculture for 

 26 years in the extreme southern part of Brazil ; bad intro- 

 duced our common honey-bee into that land, and was the 

 originator of modern bee-keeping there. 



I did not know that, according to Dr. Miller, Hannemann 

 was a tailor by trade; but it is very evident that he could not 

 have had very much leisure to follow his profession, for he 

 was so extensively engaged in bee-keeping and honey-produc- 

 tion that his breeding-stock numbered over oOO colonies, 

 which were allowed to swarm at will. Prom what I have 

 read on and between the lines it would seem to me that all 

 these colonies were kept in stationary hives, perhaps box- 

 hives, as we call the hives without frames. Hannemann's aim 

 was, in the first place, to have his colonies swarm all they 

 would, and that was all he expected or askt of them. He 

 called them his stock capital. The young swarms were the 

 interest, so to speak, to be exchanged for honey during the 

 honey season. The ]iow will be shown later on. 



Southern Brazil must be well adapted to bee-culture. 

 Hannemann spoke of his honey season as lasting from two 

 and a half to three months. For six weeks the secretion is 

 so plenteous that bees will not work on any honey offered 

 them in the open air. I think we might be able to show some- 

 thing with such a honey-flow. I have not seen a day like that 

 here in several years, even when 1 secured a fair yield. 



The queen-excluder was Invented or gotten up for a dif- 

 ferent purpose from what we use it for now. Hannemann 

 may have been led to make his invention on account of many 

 young swarms often going together when swarming at the 

 same time, and he wanting to make a sure thing of it to catch 

 all the queens. At any rate, he constructed a sieve with the 

 view of sifting his bees before hiving them, and so the appli- 

 ance has been named "Hannemann's bee-sieve." In sifting 

 his bees he probably encountered the difficulty of getting the 

 drones and queens mixt together in a heap ; and the gain by 

 using just the queen-excluding plate proved insufficient for 

 the accomplishment of his object, so he added another sieve 

 having wider passages, with space between the two. This 

 workt well. It separated and secured queens and drones, 

 allowing the workers to pass through. The latter were hived 

 in the peculiar mammoth hives to be described further on, 

 the drones destroyed, and the queens confined in cages of his 

 own construction. 



This brings us to the second use of the queen-excluding 

 metal, for these cages were made of such (I wonder that the 

 excluding metal has not been used for this purpose by some of 

 our bee-keepers who practice caging during the honey season). 

 Hannemann wanted his queens caged so as to allow the bees 

 to comriiunicate with them unhampered, hence he made the 

 cages of perforated metal. The unique manner of his man- 

 agement of the young swarms made it strictly necessary to 

 have every queen secured. If possible, all the swarms coming 

 in one day were placed in one single mammoth hive. Mr. 



Hanuemann speaks particularly of one day in 1879, when he 

 had 79 swarms issue, to be taken care of by himself with the 

 help of his three young children, to be sifted, queens caged, 

 and the bees weighed and hived. One giant hive and two 

 barrels accommodated this enormous "pile "of bees. They 

 gave at the end of the season, net, about 1,600 pounds of 

 honey. 



iHx. Hannemann speaks at another time of his "Boss 

 Giant hive " of 50,000 cubic inches, made four stories high, 

 cupboard fashion, with eight hinged doors in the rear, to give 

 access — a hive that harmoniously accommodated 54 kilograms 

 of bees (about 119X pounds) from which he harvested, at the 

 close of his 23^ months' honey season, 448 kilograms of honey 

 (equal to about 987 pounds), and 38 pounds of wax, reckon- 

 ing a kilogram as 2 1/5 pounds. In other words, one or 

 each kilogram of bees was exchanged for 8?^ kilograms of 

 honey. Of the 14 caged queens but 9 were alive when the 

 honey was exit out. 



In 1879 Mr. Hannemann had to take care of 700 swarms 

 (young) in two months. His entire crop amounted to 

 15,428 pounds of honey, and 1,212 pounds of wax. He 

 stored his honey largely In cemented vats or cisterns. It Is 

 astonishing, so adds Mr. Hanuemann to his report, to think 

 that so much honey could be produced in one locality, espe- 

 cially when taking into consideration the fact that over 800 

 breeding colonies used large but (of course) unknown quanti- 

 ties for breeding besides, and storing their winter supplies at 

 the same time. I would add, it goes to prove that Hanne- 

 mann has a splendid location, perhaps like California or Cuba, 

 altho he says that the slipshod bee-keepers complain that bees 

 do not pay any more. 



The publication of Hannemann's system created a great 

 stir among the German bee-keepers at the time — probably 

 more on account of the novelty of it than for any other rea- 

 son, altho, of course, we all appreciate the queen-excluder. I 

 have not heard of any one in Germany who practices the Han- 

 nemann system as he did. Mr. H. Guehler, after several 

 years of trial, thinks but little of the excluder for his locality, 

 but values highly the queen-cage constructed a la Hanne- 

 mann. He workt out this system : When the honey season 

 is nicely begun he confines the queens in Hannemann cages, 

 and places them on top of the brood-frames with super, or, as 

 thsy call it, "honey-chamber," above. The bees, he says, 

 immediately take possession of the super, providing honey is 

 coming in. 



When we cage a queen in the brood-nest in an ordinary 

 wirecloth cage, the bees behave but little differently from 

 what they do when the queen is entirely removed. They al- 

 most always construct queen-cells over larvaj, and the prog- 

 ress in the sections is slow, if, indeed, any work is done at all. 

 This is according to my experience. But when a queen-cage 

 of the Hannemann order Is used, and the bees can communi- 

 cate freely with the queen, they do not seem to be aware that 

 she is caged at all, and Mr. Guehler finds that everything 

 moves along in the hive normally. Queen-cells are not con- 

 structed. The combs become lieavier and heavier, and the 

 work in the super — that is, comb-building and honey storing — 

 goes right on unless the honey-flow ceases. Guehler thinks it 

 Is best to release the queen again after two weeks of confine- 

 ment, removing at the same time a few of the heavy combs 

 from the center of the brood-nest, inserting comb foundation 

 in their stead. Empty comb does not prove to be a success, 

 as the bees will fill In honey too soon. The bees will draw the 

 foundation into comb just about as fast as the queen can 

 utilize it, and she will at once be ready .to enter upon her 

 maternal duties as if she had not been obliged to suspend her 

 work. The bees very readily accept their queen, for in 

 reality they have never been separated from her. Guehler 

 finds that queens come out uninjured by this confinement, 

 prove to be just as fertile, productive, and long-lived as If 

 they had always had their freedom. When carrying the cag- 

 ing plan to excess — that is, confining the queen for an unrea- 

 sonably long time (in this one case he speaks of, it was five 

 weeks), laying workers made their appearance. 



It seems, then, that some German bee-keepers modified 

 the Hannemann system to suit their own environments, or 

 pickt out the valuable features according to their own judg- 

 ment. I noticed, also, that after the publication of Hanne- 

 mann's invention queen-cages like this were offered for sale. 

 They consisted simply of a little wooden frame covered with 

 the perforated metal on each side. 



Right here I want to add that some of ourGerman friends 

 across the water have adopted at least some features of our 

 methods, our hives and appliances, owing in a great measure, 

 probably, to the efforts made by Mr. Stachelhausen, of Texas, 

 and myself, to enlighten them on the subject of American 

 bee-hives and our general management of bees. Of course, 



