402 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Dec. 



INSTINCT OF BEES. 



PnpJ HE theory, that the instinet of bees is "the re- 

 "'ijj'^ suit of hiiliit and of accuniulatod experience," 



^ is liable to serious objections. There is no ev- 

 idence to support it. It is not known that bees are 

 any wiser now than they were thousands of years 

 a^o. or that they huild their conil) or do their work 

 in a (lifTerent ■ ay. Ag-ain, unless the primitive bees 

 had been adepts in all the arts of the bee-hive, their 

 race would soon have become e.xtinct, and there 

 could have been no "accumulated experience." But 

 what is still more conclusive is, that the queens and 

 drones, the prog'cnitors of worker bees, have no ex- 

 perience in arts of productive industry. The 

 drones, the sires of all working bees, are themselves 

 perfect idlers. If they had to g-ather their own 

 food, they would starve to death in the midst of the 

 honey season. The little worker is surely not in- 

 debted to its lordly father, for any of its wisdom or 

 energy. The queen, or mother bee, is a noble and 

 dig-niried lady, the most important personage in the 

 family. She' is no idler, but she does just one thing. 

 She deposits eggs, sometimes at the rate of two 

 thousand every twent.v-four hours; bvit of comb 

 building, broodfeeding, queen raising, ventilation, 

 gathering honey, pollen, and propolis, she knows 

 nothing, does nothing, and consequently she can 

 have no "accumulated experience" in these things, 

 to transmit to her children. 



But the "little bus.v bee which gathers honey all 

 the day from every opening flower" and does all the 

 work of the household, does not reproduce its kind. 

 It derives its existence from parents unlike itself in 

 form, instinet, and habits, passes a few short weeks 

 in busy work, shows itself an adept in many curious 

 arts, and then passes out of existence without any 

 effort to propagate its kind. Thus the wisdr)ni of 

 the worker bees can by no means be the result of 

 the "accumulated experience" of worker bees in 

 ages past, because they are in no way whatever 

 their descendants, though they are all from one 

 common stock, and have received a common nature 

 and instincts, which develope into the same life of 

 skillful and well regulated industry. 



Jno. \V. White. 



Milroy, Pa., Oct. 38, 1878. 



Tliiiiik you, friend W., but there is one 

 serious trouble in the way of attempting to 

 reply to your letter. You have hnished the 

 subject, and set up an impenetrable wall, as 

 it were, by point blank statements. I know 

 it is not an iniusual way of speaking, but yet 

 I could not help watching all the way thro' 

 your letter, for some single expression, such 

 as "Am I correct," or "If I have made no 

 mistake.'- If 7 have made no mistake, my 

 friend, you are under a misapprehension, in 

 part at least. Perhaps we are both some- 

 what in error. We all know that we can 

 change our bees greatly, by selecting i)artic- 

 ular queens to breed from," and that we can 

 change the ilrones, (|ueens, workers, or all, 

 at pleasure. Friend Pike lias developed a 

 strain of bees he calls Albinos, just because 

 the worker bees have a whitish band near 

 the yellow bands. The queen looked not dif- 

 ferent from other queens, but one of her 

 daughters that mated witli a hybrid drone, 

 produced bees with the white bands much 

 more distinct than on the workers from the 

 mother. Had I kept on selecting queens 

 that i)roduced bees with the most clearly 

 marked white bands, every time, I sliould 

 soon have had bees looking like wliite ringed 

 hornets. As no particular good could have 

 come of this more than to satisfy curiosity, 

 I did not carry the experiment furtlier. 

 Again ; I have ntentioned a colony that pro- 

 duced drones with cherry-red heads. Had I 

 cared to perpetuate this peculiarity, it would 

 Imve taken but few generations, perhaps one 

 season only, to have got red headed drones 

 Avithout fail, by simply selecting the mothers 



that produced the reddest heads. Finally, a 

 great many of us have tried selecting tlie 

 yellowest queens to breed from, and we have 

 had no trouble in getting iiueens a light yel- 

 low, from '"head to foot." The most of us 

 soon discovered that we had chosen light 

 color, at the expense of honey, ami so we 

 sent back to Italy, for queens that liad been 

 selected by Nature's stern law, to produce 

 workers tliat gave the most honey. Italy 

 does not produce honey, as does our'country, 

 and the bees have therefore to work or 

 starve ; the laziest do starve, and the best, 

 or lather the hardiest and best workers, sur- 

 vive and are sent over here, to revel in the 

 abundant i)asturage of our climate. In the 

 course of time, they get lazy again, because 

 they can ordinarily gather I or o times as 

 much food in a season as they need over 

 winter, and then we have to seiid for a new 

 im])ortation. This last point is merely a 

 suggestion of mine ; you can accept or reject 

 it as you choose. I cannot for a moment 

 doubt that our Heavenly Father has so ar- 

 ranged things, that bees, fruits, and flowers 

 (as well as other things), shall, to a certain 

 limit, be moulded by us according to our 

 wants and wislies. See Gen. ]; 2o. 



As a new generation of bees can be se- 

 cured almost every three weeks, they are, to 

 an astonishing degree, susceiitible f(n' this 

 purpose. Suppose we wish to raise the white 

 banded bees ; we woidd get a stock whose 

 bees showed this peculiarity somewhat, raise 

 a lot of cells — say a dozen, and one (jueen of 

 the dozen would" be almost sure to ])roduce 

 workers showing the desired trait still 

 more. As soon as this queen lays, start a 

 dozen more cells, selecting one from the 

 dozen as before. This jn-ocess can be re- 

 peated several times the same season. We 

 can also aim to get extremely industrious 

 bees, as well as to get prettily marked ones; 

 or we can work for very gentle bees, or for al- 

 most any trait we choose. This is not the- 

 ory ;ilone, for the matter was experimented 

 up"()n before we ever saw Italians, showing 

 that bees could be changed, like a flock of 

 ducks, from white to black, or r/cc versa, 

 by patience and faithful attention. Do not 

 the gardeners and florists change their fruits 

 and flowersV and that, too, in a single life- 

 time? Who can say what changes might be 

 wrought, in even a thousand years? I have 

 no conception of what the honey bee was 

 when God first created it. I can readily im- 

 agine that the law of capillary attraction 

 might have fixed the size of the "cell to hold 

 the honey, very nearly \\hat it is now, but it 

 seems to me, as they made their way from 

 the warm climate in which they are supposed 

 to have existed originally, that their disposi- 

 tion and habits would be changed very 

 much. It seems quite likely that their hab- 

 its of industry came from seasons of drouth 

 and cold, as well as the sharp contention and 

 the disposition to rob that spring from these 

 seasons of scarcity. After feeding a colony 

 a hundred lbs. of honey, or more, they get 

 lazy and listless, and seem to care little for 

 the inroads of robbers, where food is so plen- 

 ty and cheap. Do not these seasons of scar- 

 city make them more industrious? Where 

 the bees have honey the year round without 



