510 JOURNAL OF HORTICULTURE AND COTTAGE GARDENER. [ November 30, 1882. 
their fourth (last) year very dark, and somewhat contracted and 
tapering. Their wings and legs often decay before death. 
Though very few queens fail to lay eggs enough for ordinary¬ 
sized hives, even in their third and fourth years, it is desirable to 
have young queens in all hives. Some seasons in Great Britain are 
unfavourable for swarming, and in such seasons few swarms are 
obtained. The queens in non-swarming stocks are of course a year 
older and of less value. If a bee-keeper has twelve stocks and takes 
no notice of the age of his queens and leaves all to chance and fate 
he will, perhaps unknown to himself, sustain great losses in the 
death of all his queens every four years, at the rate of three deaths 
every year. Are some young queens better and more prolific than 
others of the same age ? In the nature of things there must be 
good, better, best, and doubtless there is a difference in the fecundity 
of queens as there is in the case of hens and other birds ; but after a 
lifetime of experience and close observation I have no hesitation in 
stating that fertilised queens seldom fail to lay eggs enough for all 
purposes—that ninety-nine young queens out of every hundred lay 
more eggs than the bees require or have room for. 
Some American and English writers on bees go, in my opinion, 
too far in their remarks on unproductive and bad-breeding queens. 
Through life our queens have been wonderfully productive, and now 
I have no fear of ever having bad queens or a bad breed of queens 
in future. But is it not a fact that some hives thrive better and 
become full sooner than others standing beside ihem ? Yes, and 
very few bee-keepers of note have failed to notice the fact that one 
hive, at first not the most promising in the apiary, overtakes and 
outruns all the rest. This is a very common occurrence, but who 
can explain the cause or give satisfactory reasons for the difference ? 
Some writers hastily come to the conclusion that the prosperous 
fast-going hive has a better queen than the rest—that one queen is 
prolific and the others are not so prolific. Such conclusions are 
often mere guesses and remain unsupported by fact and argument. 
Take a hive of slow progress—one that loiters on the way and 
gathers less honey than others standing beside it. At last it swarms, 
and the swarm and old queen get an empty hive to fill. Now every¬ 
thing srems to alter; the bees work as fast as they can, and soon 
fill the hive with combs and the combs with brood. In about three 
weeks tho swarm-hive becomes as full of brood and honey as the 
mother hive was at the time of swarming. The same queen and 
bees now do more work than they did in the old hive—three times 
as much work is done in the new hive. All this happens in 
hundreds of instances, and some people too hastily blame the queens 
and say they are unprolific. If the queens are at fault in the old 
hives before swarming, why are they not at fault in the new hives 
after? And why do swarms in good seasons so often overtake and 
outrun non-swarmers both in breeding bees and gathering honey? 
The cause of hives not prospering is far more likely to be found in 
their internal condition rather than in their queens being poor egg- 
producers. It is not just to cast the blame of bad luck and bad 
management on queens whose marvellous productiveness so seldom 
fails. However, the question of slow-moving and non-productive 
hives, viewed from a practical point, is one of great importance and 
cannot be too deeply pondered; it is a question for all bee-keepers, 
and its solution will enlighten and help all apiarians. Meanwhile 
let all aim at having hives with young sweet combs, young queens, 
and strong with workers. These are essential conditions of success. 
The owner of an apiary of such stocks has nothing to fear ; on good 
pasture and under sunny skies the results of his efforts will he 
highly satisfactory.—A. Pettigrew. 
THE ART OF BEE-KEEPING.—No. 3. 
( Continued from page 464.) 
NATURAL HISTORY. 
Much assistance can likewise be given to the building instincts 
of the bee, for it must be remembered that the material from which 
those marvellous combs are built are not gathered by the bees, as 
many suppose, but are elaborated from their own bodies at much 
expense of time, and money, and tissue. To produce the eight 
little scales of wax which may be seen protruding from the wax 
pockets under the abdomen, and which together would form a pellet 
less than a grain of mustard seed, the bee must gorge itself with 
honey and hang in a semi-dormant state for about twenty-four 
hours. With half or two-thirds of the bees of a large swarm thus 
gorged and inactive at one time, anyone can see that wax is really 
an expensive substance both to the bees and the bee-keeper. 
Happily, recent inventions have now made comb foundations of 
pure wax so easily and cheaply obtained that no modern bee-keeper 
thinks of allowing his bees to produce all the wax required for 
their combs, or to build these of a kind and shape detrimental to 
the colony and inconvenient for management. With bar frames 
and sectional supers comb foundations are a great boon, and the 
more liberally they are used in an apiary the more profitable will 
they be. 
One other instinct, equally strong in queen, workers, and drones, 
must not be lost sight of, that of locality. On first taking flight 
from its hive every bee “ marks its location ” by making the circuit 
of its hive in ever-increasing circles, until its po ition with regard 
to surrounding objects is thoroughly apprehended. After that it 
sallies forth apparently heedless as to its location, but never fails to 
find its way back from whatever distance it may have flown to. 
As bees have been known to fly in search of honey to a distance of 
over five miles from their hive the acuteness of this instinct is 
remarkable. Should the hive be removed during its absence the 
bee will return to the old spot and probably perish; a remove of a 
foot or two will even cause it great confusion. The bee-keeper 
should thus be careful in regard to all needful alterations about his 
apiary. All removals should take place during the winter months, 
and even then only with great precaution, unless the distance to 
be covered be several miles. Small distances may be covered in 
summer by easy stages of a foot or two daily. Bees likewise mark 
their location anew after settling or being hived as a swarm, and 
this gives us an easy way of effecting removals at any season with 
small loss. We simply reduce the bees to the condition of a swarm 
by first driving or shaking them into an empty box or skep, and 
preferably in the evening, and afterwards run them into the hive 
in its new location. But the loss of a few bees through heedless 
removals is as nothing to the loss of queens that often takes place 
through hives being removed or altered in appearance during the 
period of a young queen’s virginity. At this time she flies on every 
fine day, but she only once thoroughly marks her location. We 
have known such to be lost as a result of the substitution of a bar- 
frame hive for the skep from which she had previously flown. 
Instead of returning to the new hive she entered the nearest skep 
and was killed. Various plans are adopted to lessen the risk of such 
losses, such as disguising by means of a sack or branch the old 
hive for a few days before making the change, and similarly dis¬ 
guising the new one. The similarity and closeness of hives in an 
apiary is for the same reason a frequent source of loss both of 
queens and bees; consequently attempts should be made by means 
of shrubs or palings to break up the monotony of all large apiaries, 
and hives that are to be near each other should differ in design 
and colour as much as possible. 
Many ocher facts in the natural history of his bees must he taken 
into account by the bee-keeper, such as their liability to get chilled 
and perish when tempted out of their hives by untimely feeding or 
handling ; their habit of gorging themselves directly they are 
alarmed or disturbed, rendering them amiable in temper, but in 
winter tending to induce distension and dysentery ; their excessive 
fondness for sweets and the apparent rapidity by which whole 
colonies are made aware of their presence in accessible places, 
making it dangerous at certain seasons to leave honey or other 
sweets anywhere within their reach; their baffled rage when such 
tempting supplies suddenly fail, leading them not uufrequently to 
attack men and animals viciously, or to force their entrance into 
weak hives for purposes of robbery ; the habit they frequently 
develope of looking out and preparing a place where they may settle 
as a swarm, generally a roof, hollow tree, or untenanted hive in a 
neighbour’s garden ; and the mysterious power of communication 
by which the few scouts make the swarm aware of the existence 
of such a retreat, to the amazement and discomfiture of the bee¬ 
keeper, who ought to have known how to prevent the loss that 
comes so suddenly upon him. He ought to know that bees recognise 
each other chiefly by the sense of smell, and take precautions 
accordingly when uniting stocks or introducing strange queens; 
that gorged bees are not only harmless towards the operator but 
towards their own kind, and in this condition may be safely united, 
one stock or swarm with another; and that at least first swarms are 
generally in this gorged state. He should at all times be prepared 
to discover that in the best regulated communities accidents will 
happen ; that queens may die or become hopelessly crippled at any 
period of their age, and leave the stock to perish unless he comes 
to its help with a new queen or the means of rearing one; that 
under the influence of the excitement of a first fine day in spring 
both bees and queen may desert their hive bodily ; that combs may 
break from their fastenings owing to intense heat or want of 
ventilation ; or that foul brood—that greatest of bee-keepers’ 
scourges—may at anytime be imported from the apiaries of careless 
neighbours. Above all he should make himself thoroughly acquainted 
with what ought to be the normal state of a healthy colony at every 
season of the year, that he may regulate his management accord¬ 
ingly, and likewise what are the conditions as to natu-al supplies 
in his own neighbourhood at any season, what are the main sources 
of honey and pollen when these become available, and what assist- 
