308 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



September 



When a good queen is laying 3,000 

 eggs every 24 hours it will require 

 1,350 square inches of comb to supply 

 room for the queen, to say nothing 

 of the comb-space to hold sufficient 

 honey and pollen to supply the need 

 of the colony. 

 Hatcher, W. Va. 



A Summer and Winter Hive 



By D. C. Noble 



THE first picture shows the hive 

 as it appears in use. The sec- 

 ond shows it with cover re- 

 moved in summer. It holds four- 

 teen Hoffman frames. For winter 

 two or three frames are removed 

 from each side and division boards 

 put in. The empty space is then 

 filled with dry leaves or chaff for 

 winter packing. At the rear of the 

 hive there is also a 2j4-inch space to 

 be packed in a similar manner. When 

 packing material is removed, the hive 

 may be pushed back if desired, to 

 permit the space in the rear to serve 

 as a ventilating chamber conducting 

 fresh air to the top of hive. 



Each super holds forty 4J4 sections. 

 With the side frames removed, the 

 hive has the same capacity as the 

 standard Langstroth hive, so that 

 parts are interchangeable. 



Columbia City, Ind. 



rpi 



A Letter From Scotland 



yUE following letter from our 

 learned Scottish friend of Ab- 

 erdeen may prove interesting 

 to our readers. We call especial at- 

 tention to the last paragraph, which 

 suggests a new thought.— Editor. 

 By John Anderson, M. A. B. Sc. 

 Many thanks for your delightful 

 letter of April 29. It is so good of 

 you to send me such a long letter 

 when you must be so very busy with 

 matters of much more importance. In 

 your last two letters to me there 

 were references to the war, refer- 

 ences and sentiments with which I 

 cordially agree, and it is interesting 

 that both were opened by our censor. 

 I hope he is pleased. 

 The May American Bee Journal is 



at hand and I have read Fabre on 

 parthenogenesis. I agree that the 

 evidence is not sufficient, and that 

 the conclusions are unwarranted. 

 Possibly he makes too much of the 

 eggs of drone breeders not always 

 hatching. The bees get disgusted 

 with those iqueens and weakened 

 and sometimes neglect the grubs as 

 well as the eggs, so it is not surpris- 

 ing that some of the eggs remain un- 

 hatched. I had the opportunity of 

 examining two queens which laid 

 abundantly and regularly, but none 

 of whose eggs hatched. In both cases 

 it was quite clear by microscopic ex- 

 amination that the queens had been 

 duly mated. Cook has also verified 

 this. 



Fabre is always delightful, but one 

 cannot always agree with him. He 

 thinks, for example, that ants find 

 their way home on common sense 

 principles, by means of landmarks 



can keep a stock all summer rearing 

 batches of queens if you simply sup- 

 ply eggs at intervals. It doesn't 

 matter how many cells they have al- 

 ready, or what stages these may be 

 at. There may be even loose queens 

 piping on the comb. I had a stock 

 with five sealed queen-cells, to whic.i 

 I gave a comb with eggs; they have 

 started fresh cells on those eggs. 



We have coddled and fed our bees far 

 too much, and we have been too suc- 

 cessful in wintering. It does not seem 

 to occur to you that the high win- 

 ter death rate among bees in America 

 is probably an important element in 

 the success of Americans in honey 

 production. There may be a loss of 

 perhaps as high as 75 per cent, hut 

 the 25 per cent left have been sifted 

 and are likely to be hustlers. 



Good luck to you, and more p »«cr 

 to your elbow. 



Banff, Scotland. 





Noble's all-year bive 



but that bees, wasps and cats have a 

 mysterious homing instinct, or sense 

 of direction. If he had been able to 

 watch the bees as closely as he could 

 the ants, I think he would have con- 

 cluded that these, too, found their 

 way home just as we do. 



I have read as much of your life as 

 I could get hold of and envy you the 

 great privilege of beginning where 

 your father left off. I agree that i 

 lifetime with the bees is not enough 

 to exhaust the interest. Fortunately, 

 the bee enthusiast need never, like 

 Alexander the Great, weep for more 

 worlds to conquer. 



You may be right in . suggesting 

 that the supposed worker-egg-laying 

 worker may be a small queen. My 

 Punics have made bundles of queen- 

 cells, as did Cyprians I had years ago, 

 and some of the cells appeared quite 

 small. I have divided into nuclei and 

 laying-workers have already started 

 in one of these, though the queens 

 are not yet due to emerge. I shall 

 have more to say later. 



I have been trying out another of 

 Hewitt's theories. He says that you 



Hive Entrance 



By A. F. Bonney 



FROM time to time there appear 

 suggestions for protecting the 

 entrance of hives during the 

 winter, but up to the present time 

 nothing which meets general ap- 

 proval, and those who winter out of 

 doors seem to trust to luck. 



It is not only in outside wintering 

 that the entrance of a hive needs pro- 

 tecting, for from the time the bees 

 are removed from the cellar until 

 settled warm weather comes they are 

 in a critical position. They have to be 

 protected with a wrapping of tarred 

 paper, and the spring winds, some 

 of which are very cold, rob the hives 

 of heat, as much of it is sucked out 

 of the hive through an unprotected 

 entrance. 



This is, of course, threshing over 

 old straw, but in doing it, mentally, 

 I think we have discovered one grain 

 of wheat, in an entrance protector, 

 which is convenient, cheap, easily ap- 

 plied, cannot get out of place, makes 

 it practically impossible that the en- 



