188 



EIGHTH ANNUAL. REPORT OF THE 



up a little Jjreeze. I have had some 

 rackets, and I would rather not go 

 into a thing of that kind. 



The President — -The speaker who 

 was to reply to the next toast has 

 asked me to allow that to stand over 

 until the morning session. Then we 

 come to the possibilities of future bee- 

 keeping, and the gentleman who will 

 respond to that perhaps has had more 

 experience along the line of possibili- 

 ities than any one present, and has 

 given to us perhaps an invention that 

 will be in the future worth as much 

 to 'US as many, if not any, of the inven- 

 tions that have yet been brought out. 

 Mr. J. A. Aspinwall of Jackson, Mich- 

 igan. 



Mr. Aspinwall — Mr. President, ladies 

 and gentlemen, it does not take very 

 much of an optimistic view to see 

 into the future of bee-keeping. An 

 inventor perhaps has a little more 

 optimistic chance than almost any one 

 else. I want to say that the experi- 

 ments of the past to most bee-keep- 

 ers ought to reveal the possibilities 

 of the future. They certainly do to 

 me. The one I want to speak of 

 first is the control of swarming. I 

 have been through so much of that 

 for twenty years, and with the results 

 attained in the last two years I am 

 thoroughly convinced of the perfect 

 success in that line. I am not going 

 to talk much on that invention ' as 

 that has been hashed and re-hashed 

 in the Bee-keepers' Review and some- 

 what in Gleanings in Bee Culture. 

 There are facts that we must take 

 into consideration, and we take the first 

 one from the 1st Chapter of the Book 

 of Genesis: "God created man in his 

 own image and told them ,to be fruit- 

 ful and multiply and replenish the 

 earth," and then furthermore "to sub- 

 due it and to have dominion over the 

 fishes of the sea, the fowls of the air 

 and every creeping thing that moveth 

 upon the earth." Now, what does 

 that mean? We have controlled all 

 the domestic animals as regards in- 

 crease, all the fowls that are In our 

 possession, such as we desire to con- 

 trol, with perfect success. How about 

 the bee? And may we not, judging 

 from analogy, and, reasoning by that 

 wonderful power, be able to say that 

 the bee can be controlled in its in- 

 crease ust as much so as any animal? 

 We certainly can control the increase 

 within the colony by limiting the num- 



ber of frames, that is easily done, but 

 they multiply by division, and that is 

 a thing that I have been working on 

 to control for upwards of twenty years. 

 The possibilities for the future lie 

 largely in that. 



The next most important thing is to 

 control the mating of queens. I have 

 experimented somewhat on that line, 

 so much so that I feel encouraged and 

 have absolute confidence in the ulti- 

 inate success that we can very easily 

 control the mating of our selected 

 queens by selected drones. Just think 

 of the results there! What does 

 that mean? It means improvement in 

 the size of the bee, until we reach 

 something that can obtain honey 

 from the red clover. There are very 

 few bee-keepers here who have not 

 tasted the honej- of the red clover. 

 I have taken from one head of red 

 clover more honey than a bee could 

 carry. When v/e have accomplished 

 that we can plant red clover, which 

 has a two fold purpose, one for hay 

 and the other for honey, and we have 

 increased our honey resources how 

 much? We can't tell. 



In reference to the mating of queens 

 in confinement I refer to especially. 

 I have tried it by clipping the' queen's 

 wings slightly, with results that were 

 favorable to controlling the flight of 

 the queen or keeping her within the 

 area of one's own bees. I have In- 

 creased the mating with pure drones 

 perhaps 25 per cent in a hundred, 

 where most of my queens some sea- 

 sons were meeting black drones; but 

 Avhen you come to put the queen in a 

 place where she cannot meet any 

 other than the drones selected, there 

 will be magnificent results. Now, I 

 know the majority of our leading bee- 

 keepers, more especially the older 

 heads like Mr. L. C. Root, who is 

 under Mr. Quinby's instructions, felt as 

 though ' it was an impossibility, but 

 there are certain factors that have 

 come in in the course of my experi- 

 ments that have led me to believe 

 that m_any things that were thought 

 impossible, as it is in the mechanical 

 world, are today possible. Who would 

 have thought of wireless telegraphy; 

 who would have thought of the tele- 

 phone twenty-flve years ago, and who 

 would think of a flying ;mia chine be- 

 ing a success? Here is our friend, 

 A. I. Root, who is rather enthusias- 

 tic on that line, i-nd as the world is 



