1883 



JUVENILE GLEANINGS. 



211 



(3) Here is a delicate and inter< sting point. What 

 color is the "rutilis" which Virsil applies to the 

 segments of his chosen queen? In its use elsewhere 

 the word is applied to the morniiij-, to fire, to blood, 

 to gold, and to the hair of the early Germans. My 

 lexicon sayp, "Red. inclining to golden yellow," 

 which is probably not far from the truth. We may 

 conclude, then, that extremely light-colored queens 

 were not well known to the ancients. On the other 

 hand, the very dar.k, garnet-colored ones would hard- 

 ly have met the poet's approval. As to the distin- 

 guished bearing and air of a nice Italian queen, eve- 

 ry one who "knows bees," and who has an eye for 

 the beautiful, can confirm that statement. 



(4) If you would solve a flrstclass puzzle, just tell 

 us what kind of a queen is this rejected one which 

 we are advised to kill off. Some of the melipona and 

 trigona queens have emrmously broad abdomens, 

 and drag them as they go; but these races live 

 in Asia and South America, not in Italj'. My own 

 opinion is, that the early navigators brought two 

 foreign races of bees to Italy, one of which remains 

 as the well:known Italian bee; while the other, a 

 race with inflated queens, from Asia or Africa, has 

 since become extinct. 



(5) If this describes the workers of the well-known 

 German race, Virgil overdoes his business in the 

 comparison (and as the most discreet of all the an. 

 cient poets he is not likely to do that;) I prefer, 

 therefore, to follow out the supposition made above, 

 and to suppose that those ill-looking, broad-abdo- 

 mened queens had a worker pl-ogeny much more 

 hairy and dusty looking than the Germans. 



(6) Virgil was not a teetotaler; but he was gener- 

 ous enough to admit that wine was a cruel luxury, 

 and that honey was superior to it. 



(7) Now, doesn't that beat you? Here is an author 

 writing before the Christian era, who coolly sets 

 forth the method of retaining swarms by clipping 

 the queen's wings — one of the very " crinkliest " of 

 modern wrinkles; it looks as though we had better 

 leave off saying, "the mysteries of modern bee- 

 keeping," and say, instead, the ancient mysteries of 

 bee-keeping. 



(8) Here the door is set aj.ir for us to peep into an 

 entirely different world from the one we live in. 

 There were idols almost everywhere in Virgil's 

 time. The most disreputable of the whole hideous 

 lot was named Priapus; and so it came to pass, as 

 we see, that Priapus had to do service in the gardens 

 as a scarecrow — the most sensible use he could be 

 put to, I think. 



(9) I never realized until at work on this transla- 

 tion that pines were valuable for bees; but I pre- 

 sume Virgil is right about it. I think, however, 

 that it is usually for pollen rather than for honey 

 that pines are useful. They may at times harbor 

 aphides that secrete insect honey. The only insect 

 honey I ever caught my bees gathering was on a fir- 

 tree. My location furnishes plenty of pollen at all 

 seasons when bees can fly; so I don't have to climb 

 the lofty mountains of Lucas county, and blister my 

 hands, and wilt my paper collar, and all that sort of 

 thing, to get pines for my bees. You needn't laugh; 

 we do have some sand-ridges in Lucas county that 

 rise away up — three or four feet. 



(10) The boys who want to be clerks in a dry-goods 

 store may read this. Virgil was somewhat an inva- 

 lid, and the pet of a whole nation, and the intimate 

 friend of an emperor; and yet he realized, probably 

 from experience, how good it was to get out irjto the 



open air, and work with his hands until the callous- 

 ed spots began to come. E. E. Hasty. 

 Richards, O.. Apr. 3, 1883. 



My dear friend Hasty, if you keep on at 

 this rate, I shall really have serious fears 

 that we modern bee-keepers will lose a great 

 part, if not all, of our laurels. Clipping 

 queens' wings is no new thing ; forest-leaves 

 for covering is no new thing; yellow bees 

 are not new, and selecting best queens was 

 also in practice in ancient times. Speaking 

 of those sand-ridges reminds me vividly of 

 the time when 1 was only about 18 years 

 old, when I traveled over quite a part of Lu- 

 cas county, as a juvenile lecturer on electric- 

 ity. Those curious sand-ridges were a won- 

 der to me as I passed them in trudging from 

 town to town, to put \\[) my show-bills for 

 the entertainment of the coming evening. 

 How I should love to see them now! I won- 

 der if I shall ever get out to see you. Can't 

 you tell us children something more about 

 the sand-ridgesV 



liETTER FROITI A 7 -YEAR -OLD BIEE- 



MAN. 



HOW TO OPEN A SWARM OF BEES AND NOT GET STUNG ; 

 ALSO HOW TO CLIP A QCTEEN AND NOT CRUSH HER. 



fAM pa's bee-man, although I am but 7 years old. 

 I can't write myself, so I am to give pa a box of 

 honey to write this letter for me. Pa and I 

 have 33 swarms of bees, all pure Italians. He says, 

 "Harry, open No. 11; I am almost done with this 

 swarm." 



Now, I want to tell the boys and girls who read the 

 Juvenile, how I do it. I take the smoker, go to the 

 hive, and puff whiffs of smoke into the entrance, 

 and wait a few minutes for the bees to fill themselves 

 with honey. The honey makes them gentle. I now 

 take off the outside shell (we use the Quinby), raise 

 the mat, and give them a whiff or two of smoke on 

 top of the frames, to drive them down on the combs. 

 Sometimes some of them are stubborn, and turn 

 their backs up, and run their stings out to frighten 

 me; T then give them a good dose of the smoker, 

 and it's just fun to see them "scoot." I now re- 

 move one of the panels, and lay it on the alighting- 

 board, and, " Pa, No. H is ready." 



And now to clip the queen. Pa lifts the frames 

 up; he looks on one side, I on the other. I can al- 

 most always find the queen first, for pa wears 

 "specs," and I don't. When found, I pick her off 

 the combs by the wings with my right thumb and 

 linger; now set her fore feet on the ball of my left 

 fore-finger, and shut'my thumb on top of both feet, 

 and I have her secure— no twisting nor squirming 

 around. Now with myjfreed right hand'^Ilvpick up 

 the scissors, and if she commences buzzing her 

 wings, gently lay the scissors on top of them for a 

 moment, and "she is quiet. "Now," says pa, "clip 

 them close to her body," for one long naked thing 

 among so many wings is more easily found; and be- 

 sides, pa says that the queens that are clipped close- 

 ly will run out no further than the alighting-board 

 when they swarm, and, after buzzing her short stubs 

 of wings a few minutes, and finding she can't raise, 

 she quietly walks back into the hive; while the 

 queen with one wing clipped will often partly raise 

 and keep hopping along from one high point to 

 another, until she is lost in the grass and weeds. 



