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114 THIRD ANNUAL REPORT 



and jab their stingers into the neighbors' boys and all who 

 come to rob. 



Mr. Muth — I measured lots of bees' tongues with a 

 micrometer. You can take 10 bees out of a hive and there 

 will not be two tongues alike. We have them all the way 

 from 13, 17, to 20 one-hundredths, just according to how -z^ 



hard you press on their heads. You can make them any length 

 you like. I have been in families where the husband and 

 wife had a good many children, and there was a great big, 



long-armed fellow, the laziest man in the family; and there -. ^ 



was a little bit of a runt, and a cripple may be, and he did 

 all the work. So it is not always the long-tongued bee that 

 does the most work. That's my candid opinion about the 

 long-tongued bees. I am guilty of advertising long-tongued 

 bees, because if I didn't do that I couldn't sell any queens! 

 Mr. York — That's his candid opinion; that's granulated, 

 I suppose? 



Dr. Miller — The tongues have been measured, and it is 

 a fact, I have no doubt, as Mr. Muth says, that you can 

 stretch, and you can measure, and you can do this unfairly, 

 and there are scientific men, and they can be measured fairly, 

 and there is a difference. As he suggests, there will be a 

 difference in one hive. They will not be all exactly the same. 

 Just as you see in a family there will be differences. You 

 will find this, that one colony in the yard may have longer 



tongues than any other colony in the yard. Go back to what J 



I said awhile ago, the nectar in the corolla of the clover 

 blossom is difficult to reach on account of the shortness of 

 the tongue, and as the longest pole brings the persimmons, 

 so the longest tongue reaches the nectar, and if there was 

 nothing else to judge by I would believe a good deal of that, 

 and doing as some of the French do, and taking that colony 

 which had the longest average length, and take that as the best ^ ^ 



colony. I believe it would be a good thing to do that, al- 

 though I don't think it of much value, because we can do 

 something better; we can measure the honey or crop we get. '' 



Those that give me the crop of honey are the ones I want. 

 It might be. of value to have the longest-tongued if we had 

 nothing better to do than to measure the tongues, and taking 

 the longest. We can do better than that. We can measure "^ 



our crop of honey. 



Mr. Moore — I have been waiting a number of years 

 for this minute — to get Dr. Miller on the run. I have had 

 my own suspicions. I spent $15 for a queen. There is Dr, 

 Miller with all his 40 years' experience among the bees 

 and he has never, as far as I know, said one word in print 

 about long-tongued bees getting honey from red clover. I 

 want to ask you a question: Do you, Dr. Miller, know per- 

 sonally of long-tongued bees gathering from red clover to 

 any extent? 



Dr. Miller — Mr. Moore doesn't read carefully all I write. 

 He doesn't think it worth reading, or he would know that 

 I have said in print what I have said here. I say, I don'*- 

 know whether the long-tongued bees did more than any 

 other. I do know that a long-tongued bee will do better 



--J 



