156 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



May 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



=3 Established by Samuel Wagner in 1861 G= 



The oldest Bee Journal in the English language. Consolidated with The 

 National Bee Journal in 1874. 



Published monthly at Hamilton, Illinois. 



Entered as second-class matter at the postoffice at Hamilton. Illinois. 



Subscription Rates— In the United States and THE STAFF 



Mexico, $1 per year; three years, $2.50; five r p Dadant Editor 



years, $4. Canadian postage 15 cents, and 



other foreign countries 25 cents extra, per Frank C. Pellett Associate Editor 



year. C. C. Miller Questions Department 



All subscriptions are stopped at expiration. Date . r ~ _ T , ,, 



^u buusiiipiiuns d.c ?' n „„„_„. i,i,.i Maurice G Dapant Business Manager 



of expiration is printed on wrapper label. 



(Copyright 1919, by C. P. Dadant.) 



THE EDITOR'S VIEWPOINT 



Bees as Trophies of War 



The "Revue Francaise d'Apicul- 

 ture," of Marseille, is authority for 

 the statement that the Military Ad- 

 ministration of Germany offered for 

 sale a large number of colonies of 

 bees taken from the invaded coun- 

 tries. A man of the name of Herter, 

 of Heilbronn, Wurtemberg, stated 

 that the Wurtemberg Beekeepers' 

 Association had thus secured 300 

 colonies at the prices of 28 marks for 

 skeps and 54 marks for movable- 

 frame hives. This Mr. Herter had 

 secured two colonies, one of which 

 perished in the trip, but the other 

 one was for him a "dear souvenir of 

 the war." 



We trust the Beekeepers' Associa- 

 tion will be able to deny this state- 

 ment. 



Refrigerated Queen Losing Her 

 Fertility and Regaining it 



Concerning the possibility of chill- 

 ing a queen so as to partly destroy 

 the fertility of the spermatozoids in 

 her spermatheca, Mr. Marius Bar- 

 thelemy, the capable director of the 

 Experimental Apiary of the French 

 "Societe d' Apiculture des Bouches- 

 Du-Rhone" at Marseille, France, 

 sends us the following account of an 

 experiment : 



"I introduced to a queenless colony 

 a young queen which had been laying 

 normally in a nucleus of three combs 

 for several days. The introduction 

 was performed at 1 :30 p. m„ by dip- 

 ping her in a little honey which had 

 been diluted with a tablespoonful ot 

 cold water. The operation succeeded 

 fully and the queen spread her lay- 

 ing rapidly. But after three weeks, 

 while examining the colony, I found 

 upon 7 combs a tremendous amount 

 of drone-brood, extending to about 

 nine-tenths of the total. This was all 

 in worker-cells, as there was not a 

 single drone-cell in those combs. 



Having allowed the queen to remain, 

 in order to exhibit this peculiar case 

 to my colleagues, I later noticed a 

 decrease in the amount of drone- 

 brood and a corresponding increase 

 in the number of cells occupied with 

 worker-brood, especially at the up- 

 per edge of the combs. I removed 

 the queen and placed her in a nucleus 

 where her laying gradually returned 

 to normal conditions. The introduc- 

 tion of a normal queen in the drone- 

 brood colony soon brought things 

 back to ordinary conditions. 



What do you think of this abnor- 

 mal drone-laying in a healthy queen? 

 Is it not probably due to the refrig- 

 eration which the queen suffered 

 when I dipped her into cold sweet- 

 ened water? It seems to me that this 

 is well proven by the fact that the 

 bees of the nucleus from which she 

 was originally taken managed to rear 

 another good queen from the brood 

 that she had left behind and which 

 also produced healthy workers. I am 

 glad to call this to your attention, as 

 it is the first case of this kind that I 

 have ever witnessed." 



"Marius Barthelemy." 



This is interesting and of some im- 

 portance in its bearing upon the pos- 

 sibility of destroying the worker- 

 laying capacity of a queen through 

 cold. Messrs. Dzierzon, Berlepsch 

 and Mahan had also destroyed the 

 life of spermatozoids in the sperm 

 sac of queens, by refrigeration, as 

 mentioned at paragraph 151 of "The 

 Hive and Honeybee"; but in the cases 

 mentioned by them, the queens had 

 become to all appearances perma- 

 nently injured. The above case 

 shows a temporary injury, from 

 which the queen recovered, probably 

 because the action of th '. cold water 

 had not been as thorough as in the 

 cases mentioned by these experi- 

 menters. Let us avoid chilling our 

 queens by dipping them in cold solu- 

 tions or exposing them to low tem- 

 peratures. — Editor. 



Warning to 

 Italian Beekeepers 



In "L'Apicoltura Italiana" for Feb- 

 ruary, the noted queen breeder of 

 Bologna, E. Penna, warns the Italian 

 beekeepers against any importation 

 of bees from beyond the Alps into 

 the peninsula of Italy, since the Ital- 

 ian race of bees is prized everywhere, 

 and its purity is of great value. 



We believe that the beekeepers of 

 the entire world will join him in this 

 warning. Although some other races 

 have proven good, such as the Carni- 

 olan and the Caucasian, the Italian 

 bees are the only race, of gentle dis- 

 position and great activity, whose 

 purity may be easily ascertained in 

 the color of the bees. A slight mix- 

 ture of the common black bee will 

 show itself immediately in the prog- 

 eny, while a slight mixture of the 

 black bee in the Carniolan or the 

 Caucasian gray bee will go unnoticed. 



Mr. Penna lays great stress upon 

 the value of the Italian bees as better 

 able to withstand the Isle-of-Wight 

 disease and the bacillus pluton (also 

 called European foulbrood and bacil- 

 lus alvei, Cheshire) than any other 

 race known. In this country we know 

 but little about the Isle-of-Wight dis- 

 ease, but it is well-known that the in- 

 troduction of young Italian queens in 

 colonies suffering of European foul- 

 brood has often, if not always, helped 

 to cure the colony. 



Porto Rico Beekeeping 



The industry of beekeeping, which 

 was reported as in its infancy in 

 Porto Rico in 1911, by circular No. 13 

 of the Porto Rico Agricultural Ex- 

 periment Station, is progressing fast. 

 Mr. Elton Warner, who has spent 

 most of his life in Mexico and Porto 

 Rico, gave up a very lucrative posi- 

 tion in the U. S. Government employ, 

 in the island, in order to take up bee- 

 keeping. Mr. Warner now has some 

 1,500 colonies in Porto Rico, as well 

 as some 500 in North Carolina. The 

 writer met him at Ithaca and found 

 him full of enthusiasm, for after a 

 few years of trial, Mr. Warner knows 

 that an independent life is sure to be 

 the reward of the progressive bee- 

 keeper. 



The Revived Belgians 



Many among our readers have had 

 occasion to feel the pangs of anxiety 

 and incertitude over the fate of some 

 of their friends or relatives in the 

 terrible conflict which is hardly yet 

 closed. We had a feeling akin to this 

 incertitude concerning our Belgian 



