Queen- Rearing
England. -
ee tein etre hae
SECOND EDITION.
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY
NEW YORK STATE
COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE
EVERETT FRANKLIN PHILLIPS
BEEKEEPING LIBRARY
ueen-rearing in England, with notes on
Cornell University
Library
The original of this book is in
the Cornell University Library.
There are no known copyright restrictions in
the United States on the use of the text.
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QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
Golden Prolific “Extra Golden”
Queen-Bee. Worker-Bee.
SLADEN'S
“BRITISH GOLDEN”
BEE
the lines madtate the actual lorths
(Copyright.)
QUEEN-REARING IN
ENGLAND
WITH NOTES ON
A SCENT-PRODUCING ORGAN IN THE
WORKER-BEE
AND
HOW POLLEN IS COLLECTED BY
THE HONEY-BEE AND BUMBLE-BEE
BY
EW. Ua SLADEN
Fellow of the Entomological Society of London,
Asst. Entomologist for Apiculture, Division of Entomology,
Department of Agriculture, Canada;
Author of The Humble-Bee.
SECOND EDITION
LonpDoN :
MADGWICK, HOULSTON & CO., Ltd.,4, AvzE Maria Lang, E.C,
1913.
607
PREFACE,
The writer, devoted to bees from boyhood, started life
with the intention of earning his living from them. Like
many other enthusiasts, he kept an apiary and sold the honey.
He established an out-apiary. He sold all the honey he
could produce at a good price, and in order to satisfy the
demand for more he had to go to other bee-keepers for help.
But, while it was easy by these means to earn sufficient to
maintain himself, the uncertainty of the British climate made
it impossible for him to support a family as well, which was
his next ambition. He was also possessed with a longing to
become still more intimate with his bees. Was it possible
for these two desires to be attained? Yes. Fully, and more
than fully were they gratified by taking up BEE-BREEDING
and specialising in QUEEN-REARING.
The notes gathered together in this little volume are the
result of about fifteen years’ experience in developing and
managing a queen-rearing apiary as a commercial under-
taking on the coast of Kent. Most of the operations
described are well-known and widely practised in America,
but many of them, together with the appliances employed,
are modified to meet the requirements of the British climate,
and some of the details are new. The bees employed were
chiefly British Goldens and Golden-English hybrids, the
behaviour of which probably differs in some few details from
that of pure blacks or pure Italians.
American queen-breeders will detect evidences of less
favourable weather conditions than their own on almost
every page ; yet perhaps they will find the book worth perusal,
for a trying climate teaches useful lessons.
‘*Queen-rearing in England’’ originally appeared in
the British Bee Journal in March and April, 1904. The next
year it was revised and published in book form. The first
edition being now exhausted, the opportunity has been taken
to rewrite the book ; it is now considerably larger than the
former edition, much new matter having been added.
vi PREFACE.
The chapter on breeding for improvement consists chiefly
of a lecture given by the author on ‘‘ Mendelian Methods
applied to Apiculture’’ at the Zoological Gardens, London,
on September roth, 1912, under the auspices of the British
Bee-Keepers’ Association.
The original article on ‘‘ A Scent-producing Organ in the
Abdomen of the Worker Bee’’ appeared in the British Bee
Journal of April 11th and 18th, 1901, and that on ‘‘ How
Pollen is Collected by the Honey-bee and Bumble-bee, and
the part plaved in the process by the Auricle’’ in the B.B./.
of December 14th, 1911. Both of these papers described,
apparently for the first time, the true function of important
specialised organs in the worker-bee, and as they are of
general interest it has been thought advisable to reproduce
them, with a few alterations and additions, as an appendix
to the book.
The figures illustrating the text are from drawings and
photographs by the writer. Some of them were made to
illustrate the original articles in the Br7tish Bee Journal;
others are now appearing for the first time. The drawing
of the legs of the honey-bee, shown at Fig. 37, originally
appeared in the Canadian Bee Journal for July, ro12.
The British Bee Journal has kindly supplied the blocks of
Figs. 3, 5. 6, 16, 17, 22, 24, 25, 20, 30, 31 to 35, 38 to 41,
43, and 44.
The hum of the bees in Ripple Court Apiary is no longer
heard by the author, who has entered a wider field of bee
work in Canada, but he looks hack with pleasure to the
happy years spent in that rural spot in the old country. and
he takes this opportunity of thanking the British bee-keepers
for the generous support they accorded him while there.
F. W LS.
Ottawa, Canada.
February 28th, 1913.
‘AUVIdV JUMAOO AiddIu NI SNAGNO GNV Sada ONIGAGAd WON
G4aAIaad SLIZOUd AHL WOUT LWA TAO UVAN “ATddIX LY ANOH WANAOT S.NAAGVIS “I'M “A AW
mag ‘uog Y UNYUdIg “HW AQ o70yYT)
a
CONTENTS.
PAGE
1,— INTRODUCTION 1
II.—QUEEN-REARING IN NATURE 2
Queen-Rearing under the Swarming Impulse 2
Queen-Rearing to Supersede a Failing Queen ... 4
Queen-Rearing when the Queen is Accidentally
Lost As 4
Approximate Duration of Stages i in Development
of a Fertile Queen-Bee . és wits 4
III.—How To Save Queens ReEsaRED UNDER THE
SWARMING IMPULSE 5
IV.—MopERN QUEEN-REARING ... 1
V.—REARING THE QUEENS 7
Preparing the Cups 8
Renovating the Cups 10
Rearing the Queens in a De- queened Colony 10
Transferring the Larve ... II
Rearing Second and Third Batches of “Queens
in a De-queened Colony 16
Combining Sues eae with Artificial In-
crease 17
Rearing Queens in a Colony that is Superseding
its Queens it 17
Rearing Queens in a Colony Containing an
Ordinary Fertile Queen in a Compartment from
which the Queen is Excluded . 18
Methods of Starting the Queen Cells 20
Other Methods of Raising Queens in a a Colony
containing a Fertile Queen : 22
Recording Notes ... 22
VI.—INcCUBATING THE QUEEN-CELLS
vill CONTENTS.
PAGE
VII.—NUuCLEI AND FERTILISATION OF leon 28
Nucleus Hives ce tae 28
Forming Nuclei 31
Buying Bees to make Nuclei 36
Fertilisation of the Queen 36
Drone-Breeding Queens ... 39
Management of Nuclei ... 40
Baby Nuclei 42
VIII.—SENDING QuEENS BY MaIL AND INTRODUCING
THEM TO COLONIES : oo 44
Sending Queens by Mail ... 44
Queen Candy : 46
Introducing Fertile Queens es 46
Introducing Cage for Pressing into Comb 46
Candy Introducing Cage ... : 47
1X.—Races or Bees... 48
1. The British Black Bee 49
2. The Italian Bee 49
3. The Carniolan Bee 50°
4. The Cyprian Bee 50
5. The Caucasian Bee ... 51
X.—Drones anpD DRrone-REARING 51
X1.—BREEDING FOR IMPROVEMENT 53
Crossing and Selection ... 53
Mendelism ... 54
APPENDIX.
A SCENT-PRODUCING ORGAN IN THE ABDOMEN OF THE
WorKER HONEY-BEE 73
How PoLilen IS COLLECTED BY THE HONEY-BEE AND
BUMBLE-BEE
77
Queen-Rearing in England.
I.—INTRODUCTION.
The queen being the mother of all the bees in the hive,
the bee-keeper finds a supply of queens to be very valuable.
He can build up fresh colonies with them, and he can save,
or improve, colonies that already exist by introducing young
and vigorous queens to those that have lost their queen, or
to those in which the laying power of the queen has become
impaired through old age. Thus the population of the
apiary and its yield of honey can be greatly increased.
Another and more important purpose of queen-rearing
is the improvement of the bee. The methods by which
domestic animals and cultivated plants have been rendered
more useful or more beautiful in the estimation of man,
namely, breeding by selection and crossing selected races
and varieties, may be applied to bees. In breeding bees
for improvement some of the greatest problems in bee-culture,
such as disease-resistance, the increase of honey-yield, the
improvement of temper, and the reduction of swarming,
have been attacked. This important subject is dealt with
in Chapter XI.
Bee-keepers who are unable to devote the time and atten-
tion to queen-rearing that it needs will find a good and
simple method of obtaining a few queens described in
Chapter III., which has been made as much as possible
complete in itself.
The frame for combs mentioned in this book is the
standard frame of the British Bee-keepers’ Association
(outside dimensions, 8}in. deep by rain. long, with top bar
r7in, long, which is used throughout the British Isles).
Most of the remarks, however, apply equally well to the
sizes of frames that have been adopted as standard in other
countries. It is advisable to have all the combs which are
used in the queen-rearing apiary built from full sheets of
foundation wired into the frames.
B
II.—QUEEN-REARING IN NATURE.
Queens are reared in Nature under three different con-
ditions :—(1) When a colony is about to swarm; (2) when
the queen is failing; and (3) when, through accident, the
queen suddenly dies or gets lost.
Queen-Rearing under the Swarming Impulse. — In
May or June, when the hive is crowded with bees, and
there are a large number of young bees being reared, ‘about
a dozen queen-cells, resembling inverted cups, are formed
in the brood-nest, chiefly on the side and bottom edges of
the combs. In some colonies these queen-cells are, after a
time, destroyed, and no swarm eventually issues, but, in
others, the queen sooner or later deposits an egg in each
queen-cell, If ine colony continues to prosper the egg is
allowed to remain, and after three
days a larva hatches from it.
The larva is supplied by the
worker bees with a quantity of
opaque white jelly, resembling flour
paste, called ‘‘ royal jelly,’’ on which
it floats and feeds (Fig. 1, A). At
first the amount of royal jelly sup-
plied to the larva is small, but it is
soon greatly increased, and there is
me always much more of it than the
2. 1
Diagram showing (a) larva can consume. Dufour and
Se ae ana a) pCoouseld have shown that the royal
Queen-coll built after loss jelly is produced in the chyle-
OF neen. stomach.* It has, therefore, been
named chyle-food. It is chiefly produced by the young
bees, which remain in the hive while the older bees do the
honey-gathering. The queen-larva grows rapidly, and in
five days after hatching it becomes full-grown. The mouth
of the queen-cell is then sealed over by the bees with wax,
and the larva lines the sealing with a layer of silk. A
considerable quantity of the royal jelly is left unconsumed
in the base of the cell. If the weather is fine, as soon as
*See “ The Honey Bee,” by T. W. Cowan, second edition, pp. 120 to 124.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND, 3
some of the queen-cells are sealed, the first swarm, consist-
ing of the parent queen, accompanied by a large number of
young bees, leaves the hive. The larva, after a short
period of rest, changes to a pupa, which develops into a
queen, which, seven days after the sealing of the cell, bites
a disc off the tip of the cell and creeps out.
The queens are not
all reared at exactly the
same time, and _ several
days elapse between the
maturing of the first and
of the last of them. The
first hatched queen de-
stroys those that are im-
mature, unless the colony
is strong enough to swarm
again, in which case she
is prevented by the work- ls 2)
ers from doing so, and Fig. 2. ;
she, and often one or two Queen-cell peed anger the swarming
others, leave the hive
with a second swarm, Third and fourth swarms, accom-
panied by late hatched queens, may go off a day or two later.
The queens are often forced to remain in their cells by
the workers for a day or two after they would naturally
hatch, and they are then fed through a hole in the capping
just large enough for the passage of the queen’s tongue.
When a hatched queen meets another, a duel takes place,
and the one stings the other to death. Thus, in the end,
only one queen remains in each colony or swarm,
If the weather is favourable, this queen makes the first
of a series of flights about the fifth day after hatching
for the purpose of meeting the drone. The drones are now
plentiful, having been reared in large numbers shortly before
the swarming season. The period for the queen’s flights
is between 11.30 a.m. and 2.30 p.m., when the drones are
also flying freely. If the weather is favourable, she is
fertilised in two or three days, and she usually commences
laying about thirty-six hours after fertilisation.
The one impregnation is sufficient for life, and the queen
does not again leave the hive unless it is to accompany a
B2
4 QUEEN-REARING IN) ILNGLAND.
swarm another year. Queen-hees have been known to live
as long as five years, but they are often worn out in three.
Queen-Rearing to Supersede a Failing Queen. —In
the rearing of queens to supersede a queen whose egg-laying
powers are failing, fewer queen-cells are started than under
the swarming impulse, and they are very lavishly supplied
with royal jelly ; also the young queens usually emerge, and
the surviving one is sometimes fertilised and commences
laying before the old one dies. The rearing of some of
these queens is sometimes started in the manner described
in the following paragraph.
Queen-Rearing when the Queen is Accidentally
Lost. — Should the queen of a colony die or get lost acci-
dentally, about a dozen larve, not more than three days
old, which would in the ordinary course develop into workers,
are supplied with an abundance of royal jelly, and at the
same time their cells are enlarged and formed into queen-
cells (Fig. 1, B), with the result that they develop into
queens. The explanation of this is that both queen and
worker are developed from the female egg, and the worker
larva is fed during the first three days of its existence on
chyle-food similar to that supplied to the queen larva during
the whole term of its existence; but on the fourth day the
worker larva is weaned, and a large quantity of honey is
added to its food. The nature of the bee is such that this
change to a less nourishing diet prevents the develop-
ment of the reproductive organs, but causes the develop-
ment of perfect organs for collecting food and for per-
forming the manifold duties of the hive, together with the
intelligence necessary to use them; in other words, it makes
a worker instead of a queen. Occasionally bees choose
larvee over three davs old for rearing into queens; these
produce undersized queens which more or less resemble
workers.
Approximate Duration of Stages in Development of a
Fertile Queen-Bee,
Egg fas — ies . 3 days
Larva (unsealed) re ate. Sige Set has days.
Sealed queen-cell me won | HE ys
Virgin queen... = 6 to 25 4,
II1.—HOW TO SAVE QUEENS REARED UNDER
THE SWARMING IMPULSE: A METHOD
SUITABLE FOR ALL BEE-KEEPERS.
Bee-keepers who require only a few fertile queens may
easily obtain them by saving the queens that are reared
naturally under the swarming impulse in their best colonies
in the following manner :—
About a week after the first swarm has left the hive
the colony is divided into nuclei, each containing one or
two of the queen-cells. The best time to do this is when
the oldest of the queens is almost ready to emerge. This
is generally on the sixth or seventh day after the colony
has swarmed, but, if the departure of the swarm has been
delayed by unfavourable weather, some of the queens may
emerge sooner, and then the operation should be done earlier,
The dividing of the colony should not be delayed beyond
the seventh day, for, if it is, one or more of the queens is
very likely to go off with a swarm, or to destroy her immature
sisters. On the other hand, if the operation is carried out
much before the sixth day, there is a large amount of brood
in the hive, and few bees yet hatched to care for it, so that
comparatively few nuclei can, with safety, be made. The
work should be carried out about 5 p.m., or, if the day is
warm and fine, at 6 p.m., so that no bees can return to the
parent hive the same day.
Each nucleus should consist of three combs with the
adhering bees, placed in a separate hive and warmly wrapped
up, the flight hole being reduced to the size of 2in, by gin.
There should be brood and at least one well-formed queen-
cell in the central comb, and the other combs should contain
plenty of honey. The bees being strongly attracted by the
sealed brood and queen-cells, and a large number of them
being too young to have taken their first flight, only a few
of them will return to the parent hive the next day. There
being no eggs or young larvae in the combs, the brood is
not easily chilled. It is, however, important that there
should be sufficient bees to keep the queen-cells, and what
6 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
brood there is, warm, after all loss of bees has occurred.
The nucleus that remains in the parent hive need contain
only sufficient bees to cover one or two combs, because of
the bees that will return to it from the other nuclei. (See
Forming Nuclei, page 31.)
Any spare queen-cells may be cut out of the combs and
distributed to queenless colonies or nuclei, preferably to those
from which a fertile queen has been removed one or two
days previously.
Queen-cells and the combs containing them must not be
severely jarred or shaken. To find the queen-cells, the bee-
keeper should, if necessary, brush the bees from the comb
with a feather. In cutting out the queen-cells care must
be taken not to damage them. For this purpose, plenty of
the surrounding comb should be cut away with them, and
those that are joined to one another should not be separated.
Very small queen-cells, especially if they are crooked, should
be rejected ; they are likely to produce undersized queens.
Very long and narrow cells are also likely to contain inferior
queens ; their inordinate length is due to the larva failing
to reach at the proper time the stage at which the cell
should be sealed, the bees lengthening the unsealed cell.
Thick cells of medium length generally contain the best
developed queens. The queen can often be seen inside the
cell by holding it before a strong light. Before they have
time to get chilled, the queen-cells *should be inserted, tip
downwards, as in nature, between two combs of brood ;
they should be placed in the warmest
part of the brood-nest. They need only
be wedged between the combs sufficiently
to prevent their dropping down, as
the “bees will soon fix them securely,
but it is always advisable to place
each queen-cell in a_ spiral wire
protector (see Fig. 3), which protects its
Fig. 3. sides from being torn open by hostile bees.
ae The projecting end of the wire is pressed
Queen-cell. into the middle of one of the combs in
such a way that the queen-cell will hang
in the centre of the cluster. A tin cover is slipped through
the top of the protector.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 7
Instead of pressing the end of the wire -
into the comb, I prefer to draw out two or
three coils and to attach the end to a cross-
piece, as shown in Fig. 4. The crosspiece
rests across the top bars of two frames, and
the queen-cell hangs from it by the drawn-
out wire in the centre of the cluster. The
queen-cell is thus easily inserted into, or taken
out of, the nucleus without lifting out a
frame. The wire itself may be bent to form
the crosspicce.
IV.—MODERN QUEEN-REARING.
(Queens reared under the swarming im-
pulse are, of course, only obtainable from
colonies that swarm, and then only during
the swarming season, which lasts for about Fig. 4.
a fortnight in May or June. But, as we ,2ucenjcell Pro:
have seen, queens are reared from worker
larve in any colony in which the queen is failing or has
been lost. By taking advantage of this fact the queen
breeder is enabled to rear queens of any particular strain
at any time during the season.
It will have been observed that in the production of a
fertile queen there are two distinct stages—(1) the rearing
and (2) the fertilisation of the queen. The queen breeder
carries on these stages in separate hives. A number of
queens are reared in a colony, then they are distributed to
nuclei (smaller colonies), one to each nucleus, for fertilisation.
V.—REARING THE QUEENS.
It is usually impossible to get queens fertilised before
the middle of May, or later than the middle of September.
Tt is, therefore, useless to rear them earlier than May or
after the middle of August. Queens are most easily reared
and most quickly fertilised in June and July, and the
beginner may save himself much trouble and disappointment
by confining his operations to these two months.
8 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
To rear the queens young worker larve of the strain
that it is desired to propagate are placed in artificial cups,
and are given to a colony from which the queen has been
removed, or in which she is failing, or to one in
which some of the symptoms of loss or failure
of the queen have been artificially produced,
Preparing the Cups.—Doolittle appears to
have been the first to have made and used artificial
cells for the purpose of commercial queen-rearing.
His cell-cup is made and fixed in the following
manner :—
The tip of a wooden stick (Fig. 5) that has
been whittled and sandpapered to the shape and
size of the inside of a queen-cell is moistened with
water and then dipped into beeswax heated slightly
above the melting point, to a depth of about din.,
six or seven times. The wax is allowed to solidify
between each dip, and each time the stick is dipped
a shorter distance. Thus a cup with a thin edge
and heavy base is produced. The inside diameter
at the mouth of the cup should be barely #in.
It is important that the inside surface of the cup
should be smooth and round. About a dozen of
these cups are fastened by means of drops of
melted wax about rin. apart on a bar of wood
iT
)
Fig. 5.
Forming
stick and
1
qui.
thick and #in, wide.
The bar is fixed hori-
wax cup.
zontally in the lower part of a standard frame,
STHAGCATSATGAGIS
Fig. 6.
Frame of cups (early style).
three or four inches
from the bottom
(Fig. 6), Comb or
a block of wood fills
the upper part of the
frame.
By placing the cups
slightly zigzag, a
larger number can be
fixed on the bar than
by placing them in a
straight line. The
wax at the point of attachment should be thick, so that
when the queen-cells are cut off the bar to be distributed
to the nuclei the knife will not enter them.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 9
Wooden cups are now widely used, and they have several
advantages over those made of wax. There is no danger
of breaking them, and they can be used again and again.
They consist of a cylinder of wood, one end of which is
hollowed out and lined with beeswax. Various patterns of
wooden cups are made and used in America, but they are
all too stout for the economical rearing of queens in the
cool climate of Britain. ~ Fig. 7 shows the
dimensions of a simple form of cup designed
by myself in 1902, which fulfils the needed
requirements.
This cup is made of a non-resinous and
fairly soft wood, such as willow or basswood,
and is turned to the dimensions shown. The
cups are waxed by pouring beeswax, heated
only slightly above the melting point, into
them with a spoon; the cup is then imme-
diately turned upside down over the melting
pot, and jerked so that the surplus wax drops Fig. 7.
out. The cup is held a moment longer in the Sladens, Im-
a ee : ridge ars proved Wooden
inverted position till the wax in it solidifies. Cup for queen-
The wax will then be found to have formed a “ sce ”
smooth and even layer inside the cup.
For fastening the wooden cup to the bar, a method
introduced by G. W. Phillips of fixing a sharp spike or
nail-point into the base of the cup, so as to project fin. to
fin., is a good one. It is a little difficult for amateurs to
fix these spikes satisfactorily into the cups, and I have
found that it is easier and more satisfactory to fix them
into the bar instead.
In my apiary a special carrier, made as follows, is used,
instead of a frame, to carry the queen-cells, because it occupies
less room in the hive, an important advantage. Twelve
or fourteen fine wire nails, $in, long, are driven fin. apart
into a bar Lin. thick and 4in. wide (Fig. 8), so that the points
of the nails project din. The bar is then nailed to one of
the long edges of a board measuring }in. by gin. by 13#ins.
To the opposite edge of this board is nailed a strip 17in, by
3in. by 4in.; this is the top bar by which the board is sus-
pended in the hive. Small strips gin. thick (pieces of sec-
tion do very well) are nailed on to either side of the top bar
10 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
near the ends to provide the necessary spacing. This carrier
may be made from an ordinary division board by sawing a
strip gin. wide off the lower portion of it.
Renovating the Cups.—Cups that have been used are
prepared for use again by breaking off the wax out-growth
and picking out the more or less dried-up jelly, or the
greater part of it, from the inside, with a nail. A wooden
stick having its tip rounded to fit the inside of the cup is
dipped into a vessel of water, then pressed hard into the
cup and twirled, with the result that the inside surface of
the cup is rendered perfectly smooth. The water forms
ANY
Fig. 8.
sladen’s carrier for queen-cells,
with the remains of jelly in the cup a milky solution which
dries with a glaze which is much appreciated by the bees.
To hasten the drying of the cups the excess of water may
be shaken out and the cups may be stood out in the sunshine.
Rearing the Queens in a De-queened Colony.—An
easy and satisfactory way to rear the queens, though not
the most economical one, is to employ a de-queened colony
and proceed as follows. Other methods will be described
later.
Select a prosperous colony containing a fertile queen
with the bees covering eight or ten combs, five or more of
which contain brood, and in the morning remove the queen
and all the combs containing brood, except the two that
contain the greatest amount of sealed brood in proportion
to the amount of unsealed brood, replacing the combs removed
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 11
by others containing honey.* Leave a space between
the two combs of brood for the carrier. About five hours
later the colony is ready to receive the larvae in the cups.
If there is no honey flow, it is necessary, for success, that
the colony be fed every day, commencing two days before
the rearing starts. I find 2lb. of thin sugar syrup (8 pints
water to 1olb. sugar), given every evening, to be sufficient.
Transferring the Larvae.—To get the larve, we go
to the hive containing the queen from which we wish to
breed, and looking over the brood combs, we select one that
is seen to contain a considerable number of small larve of
about the right size (see below), preferably one that has not
become dark with re-
peated use. After hav-
ing carefully looked
for the queen on this
comb—if she is there
we lift her off into
the hive—we give the
comb a gentle shake
in front of the hive
so as to detach the
loosely clinging bees,
letting them run into
the hive, and the rest
of the bees we brush
off with a twig of
spruce.
The comb is now
— brought indoors, or
igs 9. e rae :
Quill for transferring larve. if the air is still and
the temperature is
over 65 degrees the work is done out-of-doors. The
comb is placed on a table facing a strong light,
and is leaned against a support so as to incline it at such
an angle that the light reaches the bottoms of the cells. For
transferring the larve from their cups, a slender quill is
used ; one of the stouter wing quills from a domestic fowl
*It is a good plan to place the surplus combs of brood in a queen-
excluded super over a colony in preparation for the formation of the
nuclei. (See page 33).
re QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
will do very well. The quill is sharpened to a point as broad
as that of a ‘‘ J" pen, but tapering more gradually, the tip
to a length of lin. being scraped to make it plant, and
it is turned up as shown in the illustration.
As regards size of larvee, I find that the lest larve to take
are those that measure about one-half of the side of the
hexagon forming the cell, or, expressed in another way,
these that are no smaller than a mignonette seed and not
quite so large as a lettuce seed. Larvae that are scarcely
larger than the egg are undesirable because the bees often
destroy them, probably threugh failing to notice them, while,
right size
Selecting larve for areata (Magnified about three diameters.)
on the other hand, larve that are larger than a lettuce seed
produce undersized queens.
If the comb is a new one, a number of larve of the right
size will probably be found grouped together. The depth
of the cells is reduced ly shaving their mouths off with a
knife. To lift the larva out of its cell the turned-up tip
of the quill is brought to the bottom of the cell beside the
larva and then scraped sideways over the hottom of the cell
under the jelly supporting the larva. When it is brought
just sufficiently far under the larva to raise it, the larva is
lifted out with as much of the jelly adhering to it as pos-
sible and deposited in the centre of the cup.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 13
If one fails to lift a larvee out on the first attempt it will
generally be found difficult to get it up without injuring
it, and it is best to leave it and try another.
There is always enough jelly for one to lift and deposit
with the larva: sufficient to form a bed for the latter in the
cup, except when the bees are rearing an unusually large
amount of brood in proportion to their numbers, and are
Fig. 11.
Transferring ‘‘ Royal Jelly’ to the Cups on Sharpened Matches.
at the same time very busy in the fields. ‘Then the supply
of jelly is so scanty that it is mecessary to prime the cups
with jelly from an unsealed queen-cell freshly obtained from
a hive. Two wooden matches are sharpened to a flat point.
One of them is used to thoroughly mix the jelly by stirring
it. As much jelly as possible is then brought out on this
14 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
match, off which it is picked, in little quantities, on the
point of the other match and deposited in the bottoms of
the cups, One queen-cell usually contains enough jelly to
prime 40 to 60 cups, for only a minute quantity is placed
in each cup. A large quantity -is worse than useless, for
the bees are likely to suck it up and destroy the larva.
; Sometimes the larve of the right
size can only be found in a tough old
comb and scattered singly among
cells containing older brood or
pollen. Then some skill is needed
to get them out without injuring
; them. But if one enlarges the
| mouths of the cells with a pocket
knife, and is aided by a good light,
practice soon makes even this an
easy operation, though not a quick
Fig. 12. one. It is advisable to give a new
The larva in the Cup. comb occasionally and so gradually
to work out the old comb.
The larve should be given to the bees as soon after they
have been placed in the cups as possible, not only because
long exposure to the air is liable to chill them—the tem-
perature of the brood nest being about 97 degrees F.—but
Fig. 13.
Starting the larve.—<After 18 hours.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 15
also because it may dry up the jelly. But J have found
that on a still day with a temperature of only 65 degrees no
harm was done to larve that had been exposed for half an
hour. Care should be taken not to handle the cups near
their mouths with perspiring fingers, nor to puff smoke over
them, for the bees are likely to reject them if they detect
strange scents in them, It is a good plan to give two
carriers carrying altogether 24 to 30 cups to the queen-rear-
ing colony, so as to make allowance for any larve that may
be destroyed.
Fig. 14.
A good batch of sealed queen-cells.
Next morning the cups are examined, and should any be
found in which the larve have not been bountifully sup-
plied with jelly they are removed, for larve that have been
starved at the start will develop into undersized and inferior
queens.
Athough a colony covering eight combs is able to provide
as many as two dozen larve with sufficient food during the
first 24 hours it cannot supply enough food to more than
16 QUEEN-REARING IN) ENGLAND.
about a dozeh during the second and
third day of feeding, and any above this
number must now be removed. They
may be given to another colony if one
in suitable condition can be found to
take them, A colony covering over ten
combs may, however, be allowed to rear
20 to 24 queens, provided the two car-
riers are separated by a comb or two.
The queens will emerge during the
tenth or eleventh day after the larve were
transferred. Consequently, to avoid the
risk of a queen getting free and destroy-
ing the others, it is necessary to place
the cells in separate cages or to distribute
Fig. 15. :
A fine Queen-cet!, | them to the nuclei not later than the
evening of the ninth day after the larve
were transferred. How to proceed with this work is explained
on pages 6 and 23.
Rearing Second and Third Batches of Queens in a
De-queened Colony.—As soon as the queen-cells are sealed
over. namely, four days after they were started, they may
be placed in nursery cages (see page 23) and a second batch
of larve in cups may be started, any adventitious queen-
cells being cut out. Four days later a third batch may be
started. But it will generally be found that the bees will
reject at the start a larger proportion of larve in the second
batch than in the first, and a still larger proportion in the
third batch, although they will usually rear well those that
have been started, This difficulty, if serious, may be over-
come by giving them started cells from other colonies. It
is not advisable to try to get a de-queened colony to rear a
fourth batch of queens, because the bees usually become
listless ten or twelve days after their queen has been re-
moved. It now becomes a question what to do with the
queenless colony. It may be broken up into a few nuclei,
but containing so many old bees it is not well suited for
nucleus formation. The best thing to do with it is to give
it a fertile queen,
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 17
Combining Queen-Rearing with Artificial Increase.
—The above method of rearing queens with de-queened bees
may be modified so as to combine it with artificial increase,
which is sometimes very convenient. For this purpose the
colony selected should have at least enough bees to crowd
on ten combs, It is moved to a new stand and an empty
hive is placed on the old stand. The two combs of sealed
brood with the adhering bees and also the bees shaken off
two of the other combs of brood, are placed in the new hive,
with two or three combs of honey, care being taken to see
that the queen remains in the old hive. Two or three hours
later the bees in the new hive will be ready to accept larve
in cups. It is to be noted that although this colony will be
reinforced by bees returning from the fields and from the
new location, such bees are of hardly any value for queen-
rearing, and a colony thus divided should not be allowed
to rear more than ten queens. /¢ 7s the young bees, many of
which will remain with the old queen in the new location,
that prepare most of the chyle food, an abundant supply of
which is essential for rearing good queens. Consequently,
to attempt this method without putting a sufficient number
of young bees into the queen-rearing hive will only result in
undersized and inferior queens. A strong colony is also
necessary for another reason. Two-thirds of the moved bees
are likely to return to the old location. The hive containing
the old queen should, therefore, be examined on the even-
ing of each of the first two flying days in order to remove
the brood that is not well covered by bees and to place it in
other hives where it can be properly cared for.
Rearing Queens in a Colony that is Superseding
tts Queen.— A colony that is superseding its failing queen
will accept the larve in the cups readily and will supply them
with an unusually large amount of jelly. If there is a colony
in this condition in the apiary, it should be employed for
rearing queens in preference to any other. Queen-cells that
already exist on the combs should, of course, be removed ;
the cups may be primed with the jelly from one of these. If
the colony is not strong, combs of hatching brood from other
hives should be given to it. Should the cld queen linger on
the colony can be kept for a long time in condition for rear-
ing successive batches of queens by supplying combs or brood
as required. c
18 (JUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
Rearing Queens in a Colony Containing an Ordinary
Fertile Queen in a Compartment from which the
Queen is Excluded.— Queens may be reared from the
larve in the cups by a colony containing an ordinary fertile
queen by placing them in a portion of the brood-nest from
which the queen is excluded by means of the perforated zinc
queen-excluder which is commonly used to exclude the queen
from the surplus honey chamber.
This is a very good and convenient method, especially
when it is desired to rear successive batches, and it is my
favourite one.
The queen-rearing compartment may either be in the
brood-chamber, or it may be in a super taking brood-combs.
I prefer the brcod-chamber, because I find that, worked
in the manner that will now be described, it does not require
so large a force of bees or so much manipulation,
The brcod-chamber should be large enough to take ten
or twelve standard frames, one that will take fourteen frames
is better still.
To make the queen-excluding partition, an ordinary sheet
of queen-excluding zinc is cut into the shape of a division
board, with projections at the two top corners, by which it
hangs in the hive. It should fit close to the sides and floor.
To prevent it from twisting the top and sides may be
strengthened with strips of thin wood or metal. The colony
chosen for rearing the queens should be a vigorous one, and
the bees should be numerous enough to cover at least ten
combs,
The queen-rearing
compartment is pre-
ales =) FE} | EQ pared the day before
the larve are given, by
selecting two combs
containing chiefly sealed
and hatching _ brood
from this (or another)
hive, and by placing
them at one end of the
brood-chamber, together
Fig. 16. : with a comb containing
Section of Queen-rearing Hive. honey and __ pollen,
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 19
which is placed between these combs and the wall (Hig. 16).
The queen-excluding partition is hung between these combs
and the rest of the combs in the hive. To make sure that the
queen is not in the queen-rearing compartment, either she
must be found, or each comb that is placed in the queen-
rearing compartment must previously have all the bees shaken
off it into the other part of the hive. The comb of brood
which is next the queen-excluder should be the one that con-
tains the most hatching brood. The cups are hung between
the two frames of brood.
When rearing successive batches (which can be done every
four days by caging the sealed cells, or every three days if
the cells are started by other bees), in order to maintain a
sufficient amount of brood in the queen-rearing compartment,
it will be necessary, at intervals of about eight to ten days, to
place in it a comb containing brood from the compartment
containing the queen, or, if the colony requires strengthening,
from another hive. This comb of brood should be placed
at A, Fig. 16, between the queen-cells and the outside comb
of honey; the previously-given comb of brood, which now
contains only old brood, is then placed at B, between the
queen-cells and the compartment containing the queen, and
the comb of brood that occupied this position takes the place
(C) of the outside comb, which is removed. Thus each comb
of brood that is given occupies successively the positions A,
B, and C, and is then removed.*
The colony should be fed every evening unless a decided
honey flow is in progress,
Rearing queens in the super is advantageous in the case
of very strong colonies that are already working well in the
super. All the brood combs, except three or four, may be
placed in the super, and if there is a good honey-flow going
on their places may be occupied with frames of foundation.
This treatment is often effective in preventing swarming,
and the brood combs in the super, with the adhering bees, will
be in just the right condition for forming excellent nuclei (see
* It is well to remember that it is possible for queens to be reared
from the larve in the combs that are placed in the queen-rearing com-
artment, and that should any such queen hatch it will sere the cells.
r used to search regularly for queen-cells on these combs, but having
found only one in the course of many years, I have discontinued the
practice.
C2
20 (JUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
page 33) nine or ten days later, when the queen-cells are ripe
and ready for distribution. It is useless to place brood in
the super and to try to rear queens there unless the bees are
already working in the super, for, if they are not strong
enough to do this, much young brood will be destroyed, and
few or no queens will be produced.
The bees in the queen-rearing compartment of a hive con-
taining a fertile queen will sometimes destroy or neglect many
of the larva when given to them in the cups, although they
will accept them readily and attend to them well after they
have been started. In such cases the larvee in the cups must
first be given to bees that are in a better condition for accept-
ing them, and then when started by these bees they can be
given to the queen-rearing colony.
Methods of Starting the Queen-Cells.— The best
methods of getting the larve in the cups accepted may be
enumerated as follows :—
(1) By placing them in a colony that is superseding its
failing queen,
(2) By giving them to a colony that has been deprived
of tts fertile queen and most of its brood in one operation from
three to twenty-four hours previously, as explained on page 10.
(3) By giving them to strong nucle from which the fer-
tile queen has been removed one, two, or three days previ-
ously. This, although in average cases less effective than
method No. 2, has been my favourite method, because in my
system of testing queens I have usually had many such
nuclei.
(4) By giving them to bees that have been deprived of
their fertile queen and all their brood in one operation, and
have then been confined in a box for four or five hours.
Prepare a box (Fig. 17). made to take three combs, cover-
ing it with wire-cloth on the underside so as to provide plenty
of ventilation, vet not much light, and fitting it with a
removable lid & containing a slot large enough for the inser-
tion of two carriers and capable of being closed with the
strip @.
Go to a strong colony about noon, when the bees are
flying freely, and after having found the comb carrying the
queen and laid it on one side, shake the bees off four or five
of the brood combs into the box. Immediately after this
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 21
place two combs containing unsealed honey in the box and
then cover the box quickly before many bees can escape. A
funnel may be found useful for shaking the bees into the
box. Place the box in a cool place, and four hours later insert
the larve in the cups.
It is best to shake the bees off the combs when many are
out gathering honey, as then the bees taken will be chiefly
young nurse bees. These start the cells better than the older
field bees, and they are less restless in confinement. The
MZ
HPT I
piel! a |
i
ill
Hl
4
\\
WW
a
SX
xS
<
KX
Fig. 17,
Box for confining bees without brood or queen, a, portion of side removed
to show wire-cloth bottom, b, lid, c, qaneel. d, strip of wood to close: slot
in lid.
inclusion of a few drones with the confined bees does not
affect the results. Formerly I employed this method exten-
sively, but finding less laborious methods sufficiently satisfac-
tory I have almost given it up.
Whichever method of starting the cells is employed, the
cups should be left with the starting colony over night, and
2 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
then, when they are placed in the rearing colony, the imper-
fectly started ones may be weeded out.
Some colonies accept the larvae and rear the queens more
readily and better than others. Races also show a marked
difference in this respect. English black bees and hybrids
generally accept larvee more readily and pay more attention to
them than pure Italians.
Other Methods of Rearing Queens in a Colony
Containing a Fertile Queen. — Several other methods are
mentioned by American writers. One of these is to cage the
queen in the hive from a few hours before the queen-cells are
started until they are sealed, when they in turn are caged.
Another method is to place the queen-cells, as soon as they
are started, in a small cage made of queen-excluding zinc. I
do not consider this to be a good method, because in testing
it in my apiary I find that the queens are smaller, and take
rather longer in developing than those reared by the methods
already given. This is probably due to the queen-excluding
zinc preventing the bees from attending to the queen-cells and
larvee sufficiently.
Recording Notes, — The date the batch is started, the
name of the queen bred from—lI use letters of the alphabet
to denote my breeding queens—and the numbers of the hives
to which the larva are given should be noted in a pocket-book
at the time. Should any cups be placed in new hives as the
result of the examination made on the next morning, the addi-
tional facts are duly noted in the book.
Also, on the fourth day, or later, the cells are caged and
placed in a new colony to incubate, a note is made of the
number of the hive into which they have been moved. When
the cells are distributed to the nuclei this number is crossed
out. By consulting the book occasionally one need not be
afraid that one will leave a batch too long in a hive, and one
knows where to find it at once. Also, a record is preserved
of the parentage of all the queens bred.
My system of numbering my hives may be worth mention-
ing, because it prevents serious confusion being caused by
moving the hives about the apiary. It is really the stands,
and not the hives, that are numbered. The apiary contains
five rows of permanent stands, each consisting of four bricks
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 23
on which the hives are placed.* The stands in the back row
commencing from the left are numbered 101, 102, 103, 104,
and soon. The stands in the second row are numbered 201,
202, 203, 204, and so on. Similarly those in the third row
commence at 301 ; those in the fourth at 4or, and those in the
fifth at 50r. In an apiary where the numbers of stands in
each row does not exceed nine, the numbering of the rows
may begin at 11, 21, 31, 51, etc. Should a hive in which
rearing or incubating is going on be moved to a new stand its
number is altered in the recent entries in the book.
STARTED | Parentage) “TART e? BOY | UvedeareD
foe e 497, te woz
Zr
10S 109
“@f B 407, Hr
105
« 28 Cc 304, /02
5o/
Fig. 18.
Specimen entries from the Queen-breeder’s Note Book.
VI.—INCUBATING THE QUEEN-CELLS.
A properly-nourished and healthy queen larva has its cell
sealed about three and a half days after the larva was trans-
ferred to the cup, and from that time until she is ready to
emerge, about seven days later, the developing queen requires
no other treatment than that the cell containing her should
be kept under the conditions of temperature (g6deg. to 97deg.)
¢ ives are stored under shelter and are not carried out until
they eee ee The practice of leaving them amongst the occupied
hives was discontinued because it was found that, in the spring especially,
they decoyed many bees to their death.
24 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
and humidity found in the brood-nest of a normal colony.
In fact it is a decided gain to remove the queen-cells as soon
as they are sealed and incubate them in cages in such a
colony ; for as long as they remain uncaged in the queen-
rearing colony this cannot well be used for rearing any more
queens, and if they are caged there the correct temperature
will not be maintained, with the result that the development
of the queens is retarded, and they may be affected injuri-
BZ
RZ
RZ
Aa
KZ
we
KE
3 x
MWY
aw
Fig. 19.
Sladen’s Combined Incubating and Introducing Cage. The form of top
shown at ¢ is the best.
ously. Caged queen-cells should always be incubated
between combs containing brood in all stages.
Two forms of incubating receptacles have been used in
Ripple Court Apiary, the Sladen combined incubating and
introducing cage, and the Sladen multiple incubating cage.
The Sladen combined incubating and introducing cage is
shown in Fig. 19. It consists of a q-shaped strip of strong
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 25
wire-cloth fastened at the ends to a small block of wood, with
a Q-shaped strip of transparent sheet celluloid (c) covering
both. A stout wire shaft is soldered to the wire-cloth, and
is bent at the free end to form a cross piece for hanging the
cage between two frames. The celluloid is fixed so that it
will swing away in order to permit of the easy insertion or
removal of the queen-cell, this being gripped by the wire-
cloth. The wire-cloth may be adjusted to clasp queen-cells
of any size, not only those built in wooden cups, but also
irregularly-shaped ones that may be cut out of the combs.
The cells hang about four inches from the top of the comb
which is the warmest place. The wooden block has a hole
bored through it, and this is filled with soft candy for the
queen to eat, should she be allowed to hatch. A tin slide
covers the hole underneath, and this is drawn to one side
when the cage is used for introducing a queen to a colony.
The wooden block is well soaked in hot wax to prevent its
absorbing moisture from the candy, and the wire-cloth is
coated with varnish to prevent the queens getting poisoned by
any salts that may form on the metal. Ten or twelve of
these cages can be hung in a row between two combs. They
may be placed into or lifted out of the hive one by one with-
out disturbing one another or the frames.
The Sladen multiple incubating cage, which is shown in
Fig, 20, is especially useful when large numbers of queens are
reared. It consists of a skeleton framework of the size of a
standard frame fitted inside with two swinging receptacles
made of wire-cloth, containing a number of compartments,
separated by partitions of thin wood, each of which is just
large enough for the reception of a queen-cell in a cup with
sufficient space underneath the cell for the queen to hatch.
The cells are prevented from dropping down and filling this
space by dents made in the wire-cloth, the partitions being
notched to permit the dents to be made deep. In the strip
of wood that forms the bases of the compartments are bored
little holes to hold soft candy for the queens to feed upon
should they be allowed to hatch. This strip is impregnated
with paraffin wax to prevent its absorbing moisture from the
candy, and a strip of celluloid is nailed on its underside.
The multiple cage is usually kept in one hive throughout
the season. The cells are put into it on the fourth day after
So RR
Sladen’s Multiple Incubating Cage.
20.
Fig.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 27
the larva were transferred to the cups, care
being taken not to chill or severely jar them.
Five days later, viz., on the ninth day after
> the larve were transferred, the cells are dis-
tributed to the nuclei, unless virgin queens are
wanted. In this case, the little compartments
are provisioned with candy, a little ball of soft
candy being dropped into the hole at the
bottom of each compartment and pressed out
flat with the end of a pencil. Of course, the
cell has to be temporarily removed to permit of
this being done. It is unwise to provision the
nursery much before the ninth day, because
then the candy is apt to dry up before the
queens emerge. The nursery is examined again
on the evening of the tenth day after the
Fi larve were transferred, and if any queens have
ig. 21. é ‘
Size and shape emerged their cells are turned upside down
ot yaaa on (see Fig. 20). The same thing is done on the
aden s U . a
tiple Cage, morning of theeleventh day, and if all the queens
Sho wes = have not hatched by then, it is done again on
the evening of the eleventh day. This
reversing of the cells within about twelve hours of
the hatching of the queen is rather important, for, if
it is not done a considerable percentage of the queens are
likely to die as the result of their creeping again into their
cells and being unable to back out. Often, too, they get their
antennae stuck in the viscid jelly in the base of the cell, and
sometimes a queen will jam herself between the cell and the
wall of the cage. (Queens are liable to die if allowed to
remain long in the cages, so they should be removed as soon
as they are ready. In warm weather a queen is fit to travel
twenty-four hours, and in cool weather forty-eight hours after
she has hatched. The best age for introducing a queen to
a nucleus specially formed to receive her is from one and a
half to three days after hatching. It is sometimes a good
plan to put a worker or two with the queen as soon as it is
seen that she has hatched, but it is a curious fact that these
workers very often die, though the queen remains alive.
One of the chief advantages of the cages above described
is that they permit of the incubating of a large number of
28 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
queens in a very small space, thus conserving heat. Their
thickness scarcely exceeds half an inch, and there is no super-
fluous space in them.
VII.—NUCLEI AND FERTILISATION OF QUEENS.
A nucleus is a diminutive colony, the use of which to the
queen-breeder is to provide a home for the queen, from which
she may fly and get fertilised.
Nucleus Hives,— Each nucleus may be placed in a
separate hive of the ordinary pattern. But if many nuclei
are wanted it is more satisfactory to use a special nucleus
hive made to take two
or three nuclei, for
then the nuclei help to
keep one another
warm, occupy less
space, cost less to
house, and can be
A B more quickly examined
Fig. 22. and fed. It is, how-
Arrangement of Nuclei in Hives, showing ever, important that
best positions for Entrances.
the entrances should
be some distance from one another to avoid the risk of a
returning queen entering another nucleus in mistake for her
own,
Fig. 23 shows a pattern of nucleus hive that has been
employed in Ripple Court Apiary for some years with most
successful results. The hive takes three nuclei, each sup-
plied with three combs. It consists of an ordinary ten-frame
brood-chamber divided into three compartments by means of
two close-fitting division-boards. The entrances are 21n.
long and gin. deep, and are situated as far as
possible from one another, being arranged as shown
in Fig. 24. The floor consists of three boards nailed on to
two strong joists. No plinths are necessary on the lower
edges of the brood-chamber. The roof is flat-topped with
the sides descending about 2in.; it is covered with zinc
or waterproof paper. Brood-chamber and roof are painted
th
al wir] ~
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 29
white. The hive is supported on bricks, a brick being placed
under each entrance for the bees to alight upon.
Qo
\ 42
a oe oe 9
® 0 © oo © © ©
==
Fig. 23. .
Sladen’s Nucleus Hive for three Nuclei.
To facilitate examination the quilt is cut into two
pieces, one of them measuring 5in. by, 18in. to
cover one of the side nuclei, and the other roin, by 18in.
to cover the other two. The brood-chamber measures
30 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
rs4in. across, which provides just sufficient room for the nine
frames spaced with W. B. C. metal ends, with the two divi-
sion boards, each
Zin. thick, and three
strips, each 17in. by
Zin. by Hn., one of
which is placed next
the division board in
each nucleus. These
strips are lifted out
before manipulation,
and so provide room
to work.
A feeder is
placed inside the
double wall at the
back of the brood-
chamber. This con-
sists of a deep tin
vessel divided into
three compartments
by wooden strips 0, d.
The feeder is filled
ia
A
T
FLIGHT
HOLE
LS S §*]
FLIGHT FLIGHT \\
1 HOLE HOLE TP
Fig.
Plan of Sladen’s
s.s.s., Strips.
2A
Nucleus Hive.
f, Feeder in Wall.
through a hole in the back of the hive by means of a
funnel, and the syrup flows into compartments through wire-
cloth nailed on to the bottoms of the wooden divisions.
Fig. 25 :
Tin Feeder in Sladen’s Nucleus Hive.
The
hole is closed
with a cork.
Each nucleus
communti-
cates with the
compart-
ment in the
feeder oppo-
site to it
through an
opening in
the inner wall
of the brood-chamber near the top, covered with queen-exclud-
ing zinc.
A wooden fence made of thin slats nailed to cleats
is placed in each feeder for the bees to crawl upon when they
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 31
got in to take the syrup. The advantage of this feeder is
that the three nuclei are fed at one filling without the neces-
sity of opening the hive.
Forming Nuclei.—In forming nuclei it should be borne
in mind that poung bees are bcticr than old ones, both because
the young ones are less likely to return to the parent hive, and
also because they will live longer. Also, wzsealed brood is
undesirable ; it is likely to get chilled and to die, it prevents
the bees accepting a virgin, and also it provides the means
for rearing another queen, which is sure to be an inferior,
indeed a practically worthless one. But brood that is all
sealed is desirable, for it strengthens the bees’ sense of home
and it adds young bees to the population after the nucleus is
established, such bees being very valuable should the fertili-
sation of the queen be long delayed by bad weather. Satis-
factory nuclei may, however, be made without any brood at
all, but this is only advised when the conditions indicate the
probability of early fertilisation.
The nuclei may be supplied either with ripe queen-cells,
that is to say, cells from which the queens are shortly due to
hatch, or with queens that have already hatched. By intro-
ducing hatched queens the queens are old enough to be mated
six or less days after the nucleus was formed, whereas if cells
are given they are not old enough until at least eight days
after formation ; also, as the queens are seen before they are
given to the nuclei the most desirable looking ones may be
selected and the inferior ones rejected. Hatched queens are,
however, likely to be killed when introduced to established
nuclei, but for newly formed nuclei they are better than queen-
cells, because they can be introduced safely, and they form a
stronger incentive than queen-cells for the bees of the nucleus
to stop in their hive. The return of bees from newly-formed
nuclei is indeed one of the difficulties that the queen-breeder
has to contend against.
If one has two apiaries situate two miles or more apart,
the return of the bees may be entirely avoided by making up
the nuclei from colonies in the one apiary and putting them
out in the other. The same result may be accomplished if
one can establish a mating station two or more miles away
from one’s apiary.
32 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
But often a bee-keeper is compelled to place his nuclei
within a few yards of the hives from which the bees are
obtained.
One way of preventing many bees from returning is to
keep them confined for five davs, but this method cannot be
recommended unless they can be placed in a cool and dark
cellar, for in their efforts to get out they rush about and gorge
themselves with food, and, being unable to evacuate the
accumulated waste matter, they die, the mortality being speci-
ally great amongst the old bees.
It is. however, possible to get bees to remain in the new
hive without confining them for any length of time. It has
been done in my apiary more or less successfully on many
occasions.
The bees are taken from their hive without any queen
or any unsealed brood, and confined in a limited space from
about 1 p.m until nightfall, due precautions for the supply
of food and air being taken. About four hours after the
confinement commenced a virgin two or three days old is run
in amongst the excited bees, who accept her immediately.
The nucleus is not disturbed for a day or two, and usually
very few bees return,
In carrying out this method in the case of nuclei placed in
Sladen nucleus hives, each nucleus is made to consist of suff-
cient bees to cover three combs thinly, or two combs thickly,
and it is placed, with three combs, in its compartment occupy-
ing one-third of the space in the hive. The combs together
contain at least 3lbs. of honey. or syrup—slbs. is better—and
one or two of them, though this is not essential, should con-
tain some sealed brood. Care is taken to see that no eggs,
larva, queen-cells, or queens, are included.
While it is possible to succeed in making up such nuclei
with bees taken from any hives that can spare them it is much
betters to select bees that are in the most suitable condition.
The best are obtained by breaking up colonies that have
swarmed or have had their queens removed ten or fifteen days
previously (all queen-cells having been removed before they
could hatch). Advantages derived from making the nuclei
from such colonies are that they supply the combs of honey
and sealed brood that are wanted, and also that the bees have
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 33
grown somewhat idle and forgetful of their old location, and,
therefore do not readily return to it.
Unfortunately, colonies in these conditions are not often
available, but almost as good results may be got by using
combs of brood that have been placed in queen-excluded
supers ten to fifteen days before the nuclei are formed, with the
adhering bees.*+ Ina well-stocked queen-rearing apiary, this
is, indeed, the way in which the majority of the nuclei should
be formed. It is a good plan to follow for discouraging
swarming, two or three combs of brood being taken out of
the brood chamber and empty combs supplied in their place.
When nuclei are wanted and no previous provision has
been made for forming them, they may be made by shaking
the bees off three or four of the brood combs of an ordinary
colony, and supplying them with combs of honey, care being
taken to see that the queen is not included. It is not wise
to mix bees from different hives unless honey drops out of
the combs, for if there is no honey flow they may fight and
kill one another in large numbers.
As soon as the bees and combs have been placed in the
hive a quilt is put on top and the entrance is stuffed witn
grass to prevent the bees from escaping. The two remaining
compartments of the hive are then stocked in the same way.
The quilts covering the frames are of thin sacking, obtained
by cutting up old American flour bags, and with the grass
in the entrance they supply the requisite ventilation. The
quilts are held down with a rack—an ordinary section rack
does very well. Special care is taken to prevent the con-
fined bees from getting overheated and thus stifled, the hive
being shaded from sunshine and, if the temperature is above
70 degrees, or there is no wind, fewer bees are placed in it.
If the quilts get thoroughly wet over the spaces between
the frames—a little moisture does not matter—it is a sign
that the bees are getting overheated and some should be let
out.
About 5 p.m. the hive is rapped so as to cause a great
humming and the emission of the alluring scent (see page
* The queens may be reared in these supers. See page 19. D
t There should a plenty of bees in the super when the brood is put
in, or much of the young brood will be destroyed.
D
34. WUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
73), and then a virgin 36 hours to three days old is run into
each nucleus through a hole made in the quilt with the point
of a pencil, At the same time a note is made of the parent-
age and date of hatching of each queen on a card tacked on
the inside of the roof. At dusk the grass is removed from
the entrances and the rack removed from over the frames,
the roof being placed there instead. The reaction of con-
tentment that follows the introduction of the queen after
four hours of intense excitement usually lasts through the
following day, provided the bees are left perfectly quiet.
It is true a few bees fly out in quest of honey, carefully
marking the new location, but they never return, and the
non-arrival of food-laden bees has a quieting effect on those
that remain. Sometimes, however, they get excited and begin
flying out in some numbers, This rapid diminution in the
population generally causes a panic and stampede, and the
bees—even the young ones that have never flown before—
desert the hive in a wholesale manner. To guard against
such an accident it is best to watch the newly-formed nuclei
carefully on the first morning, and if too many bees are seen
to be leaving any of them, to immediately re-block its
entrance with grass. It is very likely to happen if the queen
is less than 36 hours old when introduced, such a queen being
often unnoticed. Another cause of the trouble is placing
insufficient bees in the nucleus to
fairly crowd it during confine-
4 ment, for, in this case, the bees
are likely to kill the queen when
she is introduced, especially if
they have been obtained from a
hive containing a fertile queen.
| During the first few days of its
existence, the only time of the
7 day when a nucleus should be
iff examined is in the evening. Tf,
on the first evening, any nucleus
is found to have lost two-thirds
or more of its original strength
during the day or to have in-
Fig. 26. ; sufficient bees to cover its brood,
ERRHEL TOE SHUN Bees UO ae mamek he temnforced by voung
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 35
bees shaken into it off a brood comb from another colony.
For this purpose it is convenient to use a_ large
funnel. *
Some nuclei lose hardly any bees. This is frequently
the case with nuclei made up from colonies that have been
queenless for one or two weeks. With most nuclei, however,
there is more or less loss, and if half the bees remain it may
be considered fairly good.
After three or four days the initial dwindling ceases, and
if the nucleus was supplied with a good deal of sealed brood
when it was made up, it will have grown quite strong after
it has been established about a week. Such a nucleus may
now be broken up into two, by removing about two-thirds
of the bees to a new hive in the evening. It is best to remove
the queen with the bees if she has not yet made a flight, and
to give the parent nucleus a ripe queen-cell.
Weak colonies, or those containing chiefly old bees, may
generally be made to produce a nucleus by moving the hive
to a new location and putting a new hive containing one of
the combs covered with bees in the old location to catch
the flying bees. A ripe queen-cell is put into the hive at the
old location unless there is a flying virgin, in which case the
cell must be given to the portion that is moved.
Excellent nuclei may be made -from ‘‘ second’’ swarms
or casts, that is to say, swarms accompanied by virgin
queens. Secure the swarm as soon as it has settled and
cage the queens to prevent the swarm absconding. An hour
before sunset, if the temperature is as low as about 55 degrees,
or at sunset if it is about or above 65 degrees, kill the queens
and break the swarm up into a number of little swarms, each
weighing about half-a-pound, and run into each swarm a
two-day-old virgin. The bees will at first miss their com-
rades and become restless, but the gathering night will make
them settle down, and by the morning all desire to unite will
have gone. The number of bees in each nucleus may, if
necessary, be equalised by exchanging the frames on which
the bees are clustering. One advantage possessed by these
little swarms is that they do not require combs of honey or
*It is a remarkable fact that bees thus added to a nucleus, even if
taken from a different hive. do not attack the virgin. This is probably
because they feel themselves to be strangers. Also, they do not attack the
bees of the nucleus, which is too weak to set up opposition.
D2
36 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
sealed brood, but may be hived on foundation. If this is
done, feeding should commence the first evening.
A prime swarm, that is, one accompanied by a fertile
queen, cannot be treated in this way. The bees have an
intense affection for their old queen, and as soon as they
discover that they have lost her they become frenzied and
will kill any virgin that may be substituted, though after a
while they will accept queen-cells.
Buying Bees to Make Nuclei. — Sometimes one has
queens ready but no bees for making the nuclei. It is then
worth while to buy bees from an apiary situated two or more
miles away. If they are shaken off their combs and so caused
to rush about and emit the alluring scent, are supplied
with plenty of food and are confined pretty closely for four
or six hours, they will accept two-day-old virgins even if they
have come from colonies containing fertile queens.
Fertilisation of the Queen. — On the fifth day after
she has emerged, the queen, provided the weather is favour-
able, takes short flights between the hours of 11 a.m. and
3 p-m., thus accustoming herself to return to the hive and she
is followed, at first hesitatingly, but later with more eager-
ness, by the drones which are then flying in numbers. Her
flights are continued on the next day, when they usually cul-
minate in the marriage flight, which lasts about ten or fifteen
minutes.
On this occasion, if the drones are plentiful, the queen
is closely followed by a crowd of ardent suitors. The excite-
ment brings more drones, probably attracted by scent emitted
by the others, and the air grows thick with them. A comet-
like flock of drones is formed with the queen in the nucleus,
and it darts about in an erratic manner, assuming all kinds
of strange shapes. One of the swiftest and strongest of the
drones succeeds in seizing the queen and he flies away with
her. When the two separate the drone’s organs are torn from
him and their torn ends usually protrude from the frequently
gaping anus of the queen for some hours, The queen is
generally rather exhausted after the ordeal and may alight
on a leaf of a tree or a blade of grass to rest and recuperate,
Should a dark cloud now happen to obscure the sun and a
chilly wind spring up she may become benumbed and never
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 37
reach home. Having recovered somewhat, she takes wing
and flies off to the hive. Here the bees may already be
beginning to show signs of alarm at her long absence,
working themselves up into a state of excitement, running
in and out of the entrance humming and emitting the
alluring scent and also taking short flights. The unwonted
stir helps to guide the queen to the hive. She hovers
about for a few seconds among the excited bees, and then,
having assured herself that the hive is her own, she makes
a dash for the entrance and, without tarrying, hurries inside.
The first few hours after fertilisation are a critical period
in the life of the queen. She is restless and the workers are
excited and seem uncertain how to treat her, The remains
of the drone organs which hang as an appendage from her
tail seem; to irritate them, and they follow her and try to
catch hold of it. They may even show hostility to the queen
herself, and in extreme cases, which occur chiefly in late
summer when food is getting scarce and robbers are inclined
to be troublesome, they will actually ball her and even sting
her. Sometimes the stings prove fatal, but more often they
cause paralysis of one or more of the legs. If it is one of
the hind legs that is paralysed the queen is useless and
should be killed, but if it is one of the middle or fore legs,
she will not be any the worse and the paralysed leg will in
time wither and drop off. When the queen is being attacked
there is generally a good deal of running out and flying about
the entrance, and should this be noticed it is best to open
the hive and place the queen in a candy introducing cage
(see page 47) with the tin slide drawn so that the bees can
liberate her in about 24 hours by eating away the candy.
Similar symptoms are shown if the queen is lost,
The appendage, if present, dries up and disappears, the
abdomen swells, and on the second day after mating pro-
vided honey is coming in and it is not too late in the season,
the queen begins laying. A queen mated in September may
not begin laying for a week or more, or even until the spring,
but one can generally coax her to lay by making the colony
stronger by uniting and by regular feeding.
For a queen to get mated as early as the sixth or seventh
day after emerging from the cell, the temperature must
approach or exceed 70 degrees, there must be little or no
38 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
wind, and unless it is very warm, the sun must be shining
without much intermission. This combination of weather
conditions is rare in many parts of Britain, and consequently
the majority of queens are not mated until about nine or ten
days after emerging, when it seems they venture to take
flight in less favourable weather and also are more attractive
to the drones. But I have never known a queen to get mated
on a day on which the temperature between 11 a.m. and
3 p.m, was less than 62 degrees, and mating has only taken
place at this temperature when the air was perfectly still and
sunshine bright and continuous.* When the British Isles
are under the influence of depressions advancing from the
Atlantic in quick succession, weather sufficiently good for
mating may not come for two or three weeks, especially
in the north and west and exposed places on the south coast ;
while on the east coast several days’ delay is often caused
by a cool anticyclonic breeze from the North Sea.
Abundance of drones and a good honey flow also favour
quick mating, but many cases of failure to get mated that
are ascribed to lack of drones are really due to insufficiently
favourable weather conditions for, when the weather is per-
fect, drones will discover queens at a great distance from
their hives. When, however, drones are scarce, as in April
and September, the weather must be very fine indeed to
ensure mating.
The workers grow to dislike a queen that flies out day
after day without succeeding in getting fertilised, a state
of affairs that takes place during a spell of weather that
approaches, but does not quite reach, the standard requisite
for mating, and they are very likely to pull her about and
to tear her already weather-beaten wings, ultimately damag-
ing them to such an extent that she can fly no more, and then
they often kill her and turn her out. It is better that the
weather, while bad, should be too bad for her to fly. But
she cannot wait indefinitely ; for, if she fails to get fertilised
within a certain period, she will commence to lay eggs which
will produce drones only, and she will lay no others during
the rest of her life.
* These data are for British Goldens. Whether British Black queens
would be hardier I cannot say.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND, 39
Drone-Breeding Queens.—The age at which a queen is
too old to get fertilised has been stated by several authors
to be usually twenty-two days, but Berlepsch and Dzierzon
are quoted by Cowan (‘The Honey-Bee,’’? znd Edition,
page 141) as having occasionally found a queen to get fer-
tilised at thirty days old, and in one case at forty-seven days.
Several of my British Golden queens have failed to get fer-
tilised within three weeks after hatching and have then, the
weather improving, met the drone and become properly
impregnated.
A British Golden that emerged on July 19, 1912, when
killed and examined on August 28, after forty days of con-
tinuous bad weather, was found to be unfertilised, but full
of eggs, some large enough to be laid.
To make a post mortem examination of a queen for the
purpose of ascertaining whether she has been fertilised or not
requires no technical skill nor special instruments. Carefully
tear apart the abdomen near the tip with the thumb-nail,
then squeeze or drag out of the severed portion on to the
finger the internal organs, taking care not to crush them.
Amongst them will be found a firm globular body about
1-24-in, in diameter, and of a silvery colour. This is the
spermatheca, or vessel for containing the millions of sperma-
tazoa supplied by the drone. The silveriness is due to a
network of trachee which can easily be rubbed off, leaving
the spermatheca, which, if the queen is unfertilised, is filled
with a perfectly clear fluid and is as transparent as a drop
of water; but, if the queen has been fertilised, is cloudy,
being filled with countless spermatazoa, which, under the
microscope, are seen to be in motion, reminding one of a
field of barley in the ear waving in a breeze.
In a considerable number of drone-breeding queens that
T have killed and examined it was found that the sperma-
theca contained spermatazoa, but it was often less densely
packed with them than in a normal fertile queen. Such
queens may produce drones only or, more often, a mixture
of drones and workers, The recovery of queens producing
a mixture has been reported, but I have never kept one long
enough to confirm this. It is evident that when the sperma-
tazoa are very deficient in numbers, recovery will not be per-
manent, The only way to tell for certain whether a queen
40 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
is a drone-breeder or not is to wait until the brood is sealed
over. If the sealing of the cells is flat they contain worker
brood, but if it is convex they contain drone brood.
Drone brood in worker cells is also produced by fertile
workers in the absence of a queen. When the eggs are laid
irregularly, three or more being placed in some cells and
none in others, it may be suspected that a fertile worker is
present. With some foreign races of bees—Cyprians, for
instance—workers will in time become fertile in all hives
lacking a fertile queen ; but in hives of English or Italian
bees fertile workers are rare.
Management of Nuclet.—Nuclei require regular atten-
tion. They must not be allowed to run short of food, feed-
ing being resorted to when necessary, and continued, if need
be, twice a week, During a dearth of honey feeding is valu-
able for stimulating the queen and drones to fly.
If the queen has got lost or injured, or has become a
drone-breeder, a ripe queen-cell must be given in her place
as soon as possible. A frame of sealed brood from a
nucleus that can spare it should be given to keep up the
population. About half-an-hour after a queen gets lost the
bees become more or Jess excited and restless. They start
humming, and a few will run or fly out of the entrance and
back again. The same symptoms are shown when the queen
is balled, and also occasionally, when nothing is wrong. If
the hive is rapped or examined the humming develops into a
roar. For several days after the queen is lost this roaring
may be induced by rapping or examining, A nucleus that
dees not roar in the least when examined is sure to contain
a queen or occupied queen-cells.
When the honey-flow begins to decline special precau-
tions have to be taken to guard against robbing. These
consist in :—
(1) Keeping the entrances of the nuclei small—pieces
of section may be tacked over them to reduce their size to
Min, by Zin,
(2) Maintaining in each nucleus a sufficient population
of bees hetween the ages of one and three weeks. This is
best done by the supply of sealed brood in good time.
Very young bees are powerless against robbers and old bees
are little better.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 41
(3) Opening the hive as a rule only in the evening
during the hour or two preceding sunset. Robbers quickly
learn to follow the smoker and will pounce down on a
nucleus directly it is opened, and having once gained an
entrance, other bees from the robbing hive or hives will
soon join them, but darkness puts a stop to their depredations.
Feeding is best done at dusk. In America soft candy
is sometimes used instead of syrup, because it causes less
excitement. Fresh nuclei should not be formed when the
honey-flow is declining or over. Prospectors are sure to be
prowling about then, and they are wonderfully quick in
discovering a newly-formed nucleus, which, having no spirit
to resist, will be completely overcome in two or three hours
by the host of robbers which in a trice follow on the heels
of the innocent-looking discoverers. Of course, no honey
or syrup should be dropped about the apiary, and the door
of the honey-house should be kept strictly closed at all
times. A solar wax extractor is not desirable in a queen-
rearing apiary: the smell of the wax arouses the robbing
instinct. Robbers make robbers, and it is much better and
easier to prevent the vice beginning than to try to cure it.
The nuclei should be examined at least every tenth day.
Examinations should not take place in windy weather, for
this may induce balling, and consequently the maiming or
killing of queens. The combs, when being examined, should
be held over the open hive, so that, if the queen drops off,
she will not be lost. A card for notes should be tacked on
the underside of the roof of each nucleus hive. On this
should be written with an ordinary lead pencil at the time
the queen or queen-cell was given, her parentage and the
date of emergence, and subsequently every event of import-
ance—for instance, the estimated date at which laying com-
menced and, if the queen is kept long enough, the colour
of the workers she produces, and finally the date she is
removed, this being followed by a line drawn across the
card.
The queen should not be removed until most of her
eggs have hatched, or many of these will perhaps be
destroyed. If she can be left in the hive a few days
longer, all the better. When she is taken away, a ripe
queen-cell, from which the new queen is due to emerge
42 ()UEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
within a day or two, is given to the nucleus in the queen-
cell protector, shown in Fig. 4 and described on page 7,
the date she is due to emerge and her parentage being noted
on the card. I do not find it satisfactory to introduce
hatched virgins to established nuclei. too many are killed.
A convenient way to mark hives that want attention is
to place stones on them. In Ripple Court Apiary one stone
signifies that the hive should be examined again in two or
three days, while two stones indicates queenlessness,
At the end of the season the three nuclei in each hive
are united to form one strong colony. I have, however,
found no difficulty in wintering a nucleus on three full-sized
combs in the mild climate of Dover, provided it is strong
and the combs are full of stores. But only two nuclei
should be wintered under one roof, for they keep one another
warm better than three.
When uniting nuclei at the end of the season it is very
important—in the case of hybrids at least—to see that the
combs are fairly full of stores. If they are not, the queen
is very likely to be killed. This catastrophe can, however,
be prevented by caging her for three days and feeding the
colony heavily. I always cage the queen when uniting, not
liberating her for three days, and then the uniting can be
done as soon as the surplus queens are removed,
Baby Nuclei—Of late years diminutive nuclei on
combs less than full size have come into vogue, and if a
few simple details in their management are understood and
followed, it is possible to get a larger number of queens
fertilised in an apiary of given strength and comb area
by the use of such nuclei than by the use of nuclei on full-
sized combs. It is true that small nuclei can be also kept
on full-sized combs, but with miniature hives and frames
the cluster is somewhat more compact. As the baby hives
are quite small they are very handy for transportation to
out apiaries, and especially to isolated mating stations in
making attempts to get queens mated by special drones.
Indeed, properly packed to prevent the escape of bees, they
may even be sent by parcel post.
The chief disadvantage of these baby nuclei is that
only a small quantity of brood can be reared in them, and,
therefore, they are almost useless for building up into
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 43
colonies. Almost every queen-breeder wants bees as well
as queens. Then the various disadvantages of having two
sizes of frame must also be taken into account. But when
there is a pressing demand for queens, a few baby nuclei
will prove profitable.
The best size of frames for baby nuclei is half size,
so that two combs together will make a full-sized comb.
The two half frames fastened together hang like an ordinary
standard frame in an ordinary colony, and are there filled
with honey and brood. Metal clasps may be used to hold
the two half frames together, or they may be hinged together
so as to make a folding frame (see Fig. 27), but a folding
frame, though convenient, is not so satisfactory as a divisible
frame, because it is an advan-
tage to be able to separate the
little frames in the nuclei.
Fig. 28 shows a_ baby
nucleus hive that has been
used successfully in Ripple
Court Apiary for a good many
years. It holds two nuclei
each on two half frames, with
entrances on opposite sides,
each measuring }in. by gin.
The floor is in one piece with
the hive. The nuclei are Fig. 27.
separated by a close-fitting Folding Frame for Baby Nuclei.
division board, having spikes
in the bottom to fix it to the floor, and there is also room
on either side for a division board, which does not quite
reach the bottom in order to avoid crushing bees during
manipulation, together with an extra half inch of space for
working. The two nuclei may be united by removal of
the central division board. A rack (not shown) is made
to hold down the quilt during the confinement of the bees,
and a tin feeder, constructed on the same principle as that
described on page 36, is encased in the hollow wall sup-
porting the projecting ends of the top bars of the frames.
As many as eight or nine baby nuclei, each on two
half frames, may be made from one strong colony. In
stocking the hive, sufficient bees should be put in to crowd
44 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
on one of the half combs, and it is even more important
that the bees should be young, and that there should be
plenty of honey and, if possible,
sealed brood in the combs than in
the case of ordinary nuclei. For
the home apiary it would be an
advantage to make the baby hive
large enough for each nucleus to
take an extra half frame if
required.
A serious disadvantage of baby
nuclet occasionally noticed in
America is that the bees may leave
the hive ex masse with the queen
when she flies out to meet the drone.
; Fig. 28. _ This, however, has never occurred
Hive Yor two: Baby Nuelet. on. my experienee tm England.
VITI.—SENDING QUEENS BY MAIL AND INTRO-
DUCING THEM TO COLONIES.
Sending Queens by Mail.—The postal regulations of
most countries now allow live bees to be sent by mail, and
a great number of queens are distributed in this way every
summer. They are sent in small cages, introduced by
Benton, containing a special kind of soft candy called
““queen candy,’’ described below.. The queen and_ her
attendants will live for several days in one of these cages.
Indeed, they will often live for two weeks or more, pro-
vided young Italian or hybrid workers of the age at which
they are only just distinguishable from adults by their slightly
lighter hair, with undistended abdomens, are chosen. If
they are not overcrowded, the bees in the cage will stand
a temperature up to godeg., there being always sufficient
air for them in the mail bags. Each cage weighs less than
two ounces with the candy in it. The queens can therefore
be forwarded expeditiously by post to any address at a
merely nominal cost.
The cage consists of a block of non-resinous wood—for
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 45
instance, American
basswood — measur-
ing 4in. by 1hin, by
4in., with three
holes of rin. dia-
meter bored in it
(Fig. 29). The
holes are connected
‘by a hole of in.
Fig. 29. diameter, bored
Travelling Cage. through them, The
tin. hole at one end
is filled with the queen candy. This hole is lined with
wax to prevent the wood absorbing any moisture from the
candy. The queen, with her attendants, occupies the two
other tin. holes, the end one of these having a saw cut,
or several little holes, to provide ventilation. A piece of
wire-cloth of the kind used in America for screening win-
dows covers the cage, and this is fastened down securely,
together with an outer lid or card, by means of a few fine
wire nails. It is convenient to insert the queen and her
attendants through the end of the 2in. hole shown in the
figure, each bee being picked up in the fingers by the wings
and popped head first into the hole. A small square of
tin plate is afterwards tacked over this hole.
In the case of a virgin queen not more than about thirty
hours old the workers need not be taken from the same hive
as she. But in the case of putting a fertile queen with
strange workers, the latter must be caged about four hours
beforehand and well fed, and then when the queen is about
to be introduced they must be well shaken and made to run
about the box until they hum and expose the scent organ.
If they continue to do this when the queen is introduced
she is safe from attack.
The above travelling cage is perfectly suitable for queens
dispatched during summer and autumn, but in March, April
and May, when the nights may be cold, and in June also,
if the queen is an old one and ovipositing rapidly, she being
then in a delicate, easily chilled state, it is better for the
queen to be accompanied by about 100 workers in a little
box containing a small piece of tough comb filled with sealed
46 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
honey, fastened in a little frame by means of waxed
string.
Queen Candy.—This useful article is made by knead-
ing finely powdered white cane sugar with warm honey to
the consistency of putty. It takes the sugar some days to
absorb the honey, so a little fresh sugar should be kneaded
in on several successive days, The peculiar property of
this candy is that it will retain its moisture for a long time,
and yet it is too ‘firm to fall out of shape at ordinary
temperatures.
Introducing Fertile Queens.—A colony is in the
most favourable condition for accepting a strange fertile
queen when it has been deprived of its own queen from one
to three days previously. Although the queen will some-
times be accepted if she is simply dropped among the bees
it is always advisable to employ some method of introducing
her that will reduce the risk. The method that is on the
whole the most satisfactory and is most extensively em-
ployed is to keep the queen in a cage, in which the workers
cannot molest her, until she has acquired the scent of the
hive, and they have become accustomed to her. Food must,
of course, be provided for the queen in the cage. The new
queen may be caged in the hive at the same time that the
old one is taken out,
Introducing Cage for Pressing into the Comb.—
This simple and efficient cage (Fig. 30) may be made from
a piece of stiff wire cloth (with about twelve wires to the
inch) 2}in. square, by cutting Zin. squares out of each corner,
and by bending down the sides so formed. The queen is
placed in the cage by herself or with one or two freshly-
hatched workers, and the cage is pressed into one of the
middle combs so that one or two cells containing unsealed
honey are enclosed in the cage. The cage will sink better
into the comb if two or three
strands of the wire are pulled off
the edges. In spring a caging of
ee HT 24 to 36 hours is generally long
fiw enough, but in the autumn double
fen that time is often necessary. If,
when the hive is opened to remove
Fig. 30 the cage, the bees are seen to be
Introducing-vi we tor Pressing 5
into the Comb. clustering closely around the cage,
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 47
the queen should be left in it longer. After the queen has
been liberated the bees should not be disturbed for four
or five days.
Candy Introducing Cage (Fig. 31).—With this cage
(called in America the ‘‘ Miller’? cage) the queen is liberated
by the bees eating
through a plug of
queen candy on which
the queen feeds. The
time taken by the
bees in eating
through this plug is
usually about eigh-
teen hours, but it
may be lengthened
by tacking a slip of
pasteboard over the
candy. The bees are
made aware of the
presence of the candy
by a pinhole pricked
in the pasteboard. sig aa
The commencement Canay Introducing-cage; d Hole for candy;
of the liberation of |e Block which is removed for inserting queen.
the queen may be
delayed for any length of time by keeping a strip of tin
over the candy. The queen is inserted in the cage by the
removal of the wooden block e. This cage is made thin
enough to be slipped between the combs. The tin strip
above e rests across the top-bars of two frames. A cage on
the same principle is illustrated on page 24.
The travelling cage illustrated on page 45 can be used
as a candy introducing cage without taking the queen and
workers out, but the presence of the workers slightly in-
creases the risk, and it is better to introduce the queen alone
in a fresh cage. If it is not known that the apiary from
which the queen has come is free from disease, it is always
best to introduce the queen in a new cage with fresh candy.
Other methods that have been successfully employed to
reduce risk in introduction are exciting the bees by shaking
them or smoking them, stupefying them temporarily with
tobacco smoke, and smearing the queen with honey. ~
48 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
A queen should never be introduced to a colony that is
short of stores, unless the latter has been fed liberally for
several days,
A colony that has been queenless for a long time will
not accept a queen so readily as one that has been deprived
of its queen or queen-cells only one or two days before. It
must be remembered that a colony that has been queenless
over ten days will probably have reared a young queen
if there were young larve in the hive when the old queen
was lost. In such a case any queen that might be introduced
would certainly be destroyed, unless the young queen was
found and removed beforehand. When there is doubt about
the presence of a queen in a hive, it is a good plan to give
a frame of young brood, and if the bees start forming
queen-cells on this it is generally safe to introduce a new
queen.
Black bees accept queens more readily than hybrid bees.
It is not easy to introduce a black queen to hybrids: even
after she has been received she may be attacked and stung,
and so killed or paralysed for life.
IX.—RACES OF BEES.
Of the genus Apis three perfectly distinct species are
known: A. dorsata, A. florea, and A. mellifica.* The two
first are found in India, Ceylon, and the East Indian Islands,
1, Worker of Apis dorsata, 2. Worker of Apis florea. a, Posterior leg of
drone of A. meliifica. b, Ditto of ae orea. The lines indicate the actual
engths.
* Apis indica, the bee cultivated in India, is closely allied to A.
mellifica, and it is doubtful whether it should be regarded as a separate
species.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 49
and have not been domesticated. In the winter of 1896-97
I spent a month in India investigating them. A. dorsata
is larger than our honey-bee, and its comb, which is several
feet in length, is suspended, without any covering what-
ever, from the horizontal limb of a large tree or from an
overhanging ledge of rock. Its wax is an article of com-
merce. 4. florea is much smaller than our honey-bee, and
builds a comb no larger than a man’s hand on the branches
of shrubs. The drone of 4, florea has the metatarsus of
the hind leg bilobate.
Apis mellifica is indigenous to Europe, Asia, and Africa.
The following are its most useful varieties :—
4. The British Black Bee.—The native bee of the
British Isles has the ground colour of the whole body black
and has the bands of short white hair on the abdominal
segments weak and narrow. In the cool and windy summer
climate of the British Isles it is unsurpassed by any other
pure race for industry in honey-gathering, working early
and late. It also caps its combs beautifully white. It is
good tempered if pure, but rather excitable under manipu-
lation, the bees rushing to the corners of the hive like a
flock of sheep, but connected with this is the good quality
that they are easily detached from their combs by shaking.
The queens are not so prolific as those of the other races
considered below.
Black bees also occur in France, Germany, and Spain,
and a black variety, which the late Mr. W. H. Ashmead,
of the U.S, National Museum, told me he believed first came
from Spain, has spread over North America. The qualities
of all these blacks appear to differ little from those of the
British Black bee.
2. The Italian Bee.—In Northern Italy and Italian
Switzerland there are to be found some very good varieties
of bees having the first three segments of the abdomen semi-
transparent orange-yellow at the base* and having broad,
pronounced bands of short white hair on each of the seg-
ments except the first and the last. The Italian, as these races
are called, is very good tempered and quiet under manipula-
tion, clinging tenaciously to its combs, and it defends its
* The yellow on the basal portion of the third segment is often hidden
under the’ overlapping edge of the second segment.
E
50 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
home well from robber bees, Working in temperatures of
75 degrees and over, it is more industrious than the black
bee and will travel long distances in search of nectar when
flowers are scarce. The queens are more prolific than black
queens and the colonies more populous than black colonies.
Italians withstand cold winters well; they can also endure
great heat in summer and do not die so quickly in confinement
as English blacks ; but they dwindle in cold springs. Wax
moth larve do not flourish in their combs. The vast
majority of bee-keepers in America, Australia and New
Zealand esteem Italians more highly than any other race.
The half-breds produced by Italian queens mated by
English black drones are hardy and energetic, and in average
seasons in England will yield heavier weights of honey per
hive than the blacks, but in damp cold seasons they con-
sume much honey and will starve if not fed. Their
temper, too, is rather uncertain, though an experienced bee-
keeper can easily manage them.
3. The Carniolan Bee.—-This is a bee that occurs in
Carniola, a small, mountainous province of Austria. The
ground colour is entirely black, but the abdominal bands
of short white hair are very strongly developed, giving the
bee a grey appearance. It is a very good-tempered bee, but
in the English climate has been found to be too much given
to swarming and to be not such a good honey gatherer as
the native bee. In America, however, it has been reported
to be a good honey gatherer, but probably most of the
reports have been of colonies that were not pure. It caps its
comb white: The bees produced by Carniolan queens mated
by English black drones are hardy and good honey gatherers.
4. The Cyprian Bee, from the Island of Cyprus, is
rather smaller than any of the preceding, and has the testa-
ceous bands on the abdominal segments wider. It is quick-
tempered. The queens are extremely prolific. The British
summer climate is too cold for Cyprians to gather much
honey ; they also swarm freely. Over a hundred queens are
often reared in preparation for swarming. On loss of queen,
fertile workers are readily developed. The half-breds pro-
duced by Cyprian queens mated by British black drones are
industrious and fairly hardy, but very irascible, stinging
the operator badly on the least provocation; they continue
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 51
to rear brood extensively until quite late in the autumn.
Further crossing with blacks is said to produce a very indus-
trious and hardy bee.
5. The Caucasian Bee has lately been tried in America,
where it has been reported by a few to be the most gentle
race of bees known, a good honey producer as a rule, and
more prolific than the Italian, but it gathers great quantities
of propolis and builds brace combs freely, and the number
of its supporters does not seem to be increasing.
Syrians and Tunisians are bad propolisers and have
other faults.
So far we have considered only the varieties of the honey-
bee that occur in nature. But a list of varieties would not
be complete without the golden bee, a remarkable breed that
has been produced in America by selection for colour from
Italians or, some say, a cross between Italians and Cyp-
rians. In this variety the testaceous or golden-yellow colour
spreads further over the abdomen than in any European
race, giving the bees a striking, and many think, a very
handsome appearance. Pure goldens have proved less vigo-
rous than blacks or Italians, and they dwindle badly during
long winters and chilly springs. They do not store much
honey in the cool summer climate of Britain,
X.—DRONES AND DRONE-REARING.
During the swarming season, there are in most places
sufficient drones for the fertilisation of all queens. The
rearing of drones is, however, important, both for fertilising
queens by drones of a particular strain, and for getting the
queens quickly fertilised before or after the swarming sea-
son. After the swarming season, it is possible to get a larger
proportion of the queens fertilised by the specially-reared
drones than during the swarming season, as these drones
can be kept in queenless colonies, or in colonies containing
unfertilised queens, for some time after the workers of
colonies containing fertile queens have, in accordance with
their instinct, turned their own drones out to die.
Dzierson’s theory (published about 1845) that the drone
is always produced parthenogenetically—7.e., has no father
E2
§2 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
(although he has a maternal grandfather)—is now generally
accepted ; this teaches us that it is the characters of the
colony that produced the drone’s mother that we must expect
the drones to transmit. The drone influences his queen and
worker progeny very much, and it is of course most desir-
able that queens of the best strain should be selected for
drone-rearing, and also that the drones should be reared
under the most favourable conditions. To be of value the
drones must be reared in very large numbers and kept in
strong colonies.
‘To rear drones during the natural season (April to June),
it is only necessary to place a frame of empty drone comb*
in the centre of the brood-nest of a strong colony, The queen
will soon lay drone-eggs in this comb, and the drones reared
from these will be flying about a month after the eggs were
laid.
Drones are not easily reared late in the season, and in
order to have plenty of drones then, the drone-breeding queen
should be induced to lay drone-eggs about the end of June
or beginning of July, and either she should be removed as
soon as her presence is likely to prejudice the rearing or
presence of the drones, or the drone-brood, soon after the
eggs are hatched, should be given to a queenless colony to
be reared; another drone-comb may then be given to the
drone-breeding queen. The locality and season will deter-
mine the date up to which this work can be continued, If
there is no honey-flow, the colonies in which the drone-eggs
are laid and in which the drones are reared and kept must
be constantly fed. The feeding induces egg-laying, helps
to prevent the destruction of drone-brood and drones, and
also helps to make the drones fly freely in favourable
weather. Virgin queens may be allowed in the colonies con-
taining the drones. To prevent destruction of the drones,
these queens, directly they are fertilised, must be removed
and other virgins given.
The production of undesirable drones in the queen-rear-
ing apiary may be largely prevented by using full sheets of
worker-comb foundation in all hives except those in which it
is intended to rear drones. Any drones that may be pro-
* This has larger cells than ordinary worker-comb. Drone-comb founda.
tion can be obtained.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 53
duced by unfertilised queens and by fertile workers, being
reared in worker cells, are abnormally small, and their pro-
duction should be avoided.
XI.—BREEDING FOR IMPROVEMENT.
Crossing and Selection. — All animals that man has
domesticated have been more or less improved by breeding.
Two methods have been employed, crossing and _ selection,
and the best results have usually been obtained when they
have gone hand in hand, the one followed by the other.
Crossing effects a change at once, but it is only by selection
that any permanent gain is obtained.
Unfortunately, very little permanent improvement has
been yet obtained in the case of bees. This is chiefly due
to the difficulty of controlling the mating of the queen.
Mating takes place during flight, and a queen may be impreg-
nated by any one out of the thousands of drones flying from
colonies of all kinds dwelling within a radius of two or
three miles. The obvious way to overcome the difficulty is
to get the queens mated in a spot where none but drones of
selected parentage are flying within the necessary radius for
isolation, which has been estimated at from three to six miles,
but no doubt varies under different conditions of tempera-
ture and weather. There is probably no spot in Great
Britain or Ireland where isolation could be obtained except
on high moors, bleak coasts, or islands, where low tem-
perature and strong winds would render mating very pre-
carious. Several mating stations have, however, been lately
established, among the mountains of Switzerland, by the
Swiss Bee-Keepers’ Association, and no doubt Canada, with
its vast tracts of unsettled country enjoying high summer
temperatures, abounds in suitable places.
In Ripple Court Apiary selection by isolation has, of
course, heen impossible, but a method of selection by colour,
described below under the heading of Mendelism, has been
devised and carried out with some success.
The objection may be raised that, considering the
54 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
impossibility of knowing which drone out of hundreds a queen
may meet, breeding by selection on the male side cannot be
properly accomplished. But if we look at the work of
plant breeders, we see that a similar uncertainty often exists
as to which flower will supply the pollen by which the seed
is fertilised. Further, in cases where characters that do not
show themselves in the flowers, such as the size, shape, or
other qualities of seeds or fruits, are bred for, the selection
of flowers is useless. It is only essential that no flower
shall be employed that is not of the selected parentage or
strain. I think that even were it possible to select single drones
for breeding from, it would not be advisable, for we may
suppose that the honey-bee depends partly upon natural
selection of drones for its vigour and usefulness. It is not
asserted that one drone transmits exactly the same characters
as another, but this uncontrolled element of variation is
reduced to a negligible quantity by the employment of pure
stock and continuous careful selection.
Mendelism.—Our knowledge of the laws of heredity
has lately been much advanced by Mendelism, so named
after its discoverer, Gregor Mendel, monk, and afterwards
abbot, of Briinn in Austria, who announced its principles in
1865. In any attempt to improve livestock or plants by
breeding, a knowledge of Mendelism is of great value.
Mendel made his classic experiments with the common
garden pea. In one series of experiments he crossed a tall
pea with a dwarf pea, and found that all the resulting hybrids
were tall, like their tall parent. He named the character
that prevailed in this first generation of hybrids—in this case
of tallness—the dominant, and the character which disap-
peared, namely, shortness, the recessive. He sowed the
seeds from these hybrids, and found they produced talls
and shorts in the proportion of three to one. He was able
to prove that the talls in the second generation of the hybrids
were of two kinds, those that produced talls only, and those
that produced talls and shorts in the proportion of three to
one, like the talls in the first generation of the hybrids, and
also that the latter kind of talls were twice as numerous as
the former kind ; and that the shorts produced shorts only.
Mendel showed that this remarkable train of inheritance
was true for six other pairs of characters in the pea, namely, .
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 55
shape of seed—whether rounded or wrinkled, position of
flowers—whether distributed along the stem or terminal,
shape of ripe pod—whether inflated or constricted, and
colour of seed skin—brown or white, cotyledons—yellow or
green, and unripe pod—green or yellow.
The phenomenon of dominance, remarkable as it is, is
not the essential part of Mendel’s discovery, indeed, it is
not present in every case, the first generation of the hybrids
being sometimes intermediate in character. We must bear
in mind that an individual animal or plant is the product of
the union of two germ cells, or gametes, as they are called,
the one derived from the male parent, and the other from
the female parent. Thus an individual is of double origin.
Now the essential part of Mendel’s discovery, recognised
by the discoverer himself, is that the gametes are pure in
respect of either of the characters in each of the pairs of
alternative characters we have been considering ; in other
words, that a gamete can carry one of the characters of a
pair, but not both.
In Mendelian language the individual animal or plant
is called a zygote. If the two gametes that go to make a
zygote carry the same character, the zygote is called a homo-
sygote. If they carry opposite characters it is called a
heterozygote.
By applying this theory to the results obtained by cros-
sing the tall and dwarf peas, we see how perfectly it accounts
for them. The individuals of the first generation contain
and produce gametes bearing the elements representing tall-
ness and shortness in equal numbers, and the results we get
in the second generation are simply due to the segregation
of these elements. As Bateson has remarked, the most
striking consequence of Mendelian inheritance is the para-
dox that pure individuals may be bred from impure ones.
Once the opposite character has been eliminated the indi-
viduals remain pure for any number of generations. Recent
investigation suggests that the dominant may owe its domin-
ance to a factor which is absent in the recessive ; therefore
we are not concerned with two opposing factors, but the
presence or absence, of a single factor. When the hetero-
zygote is intermediate, we have no means of knowing in
which of the two pure kinds of individuals the factor resides.
56 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
oa aa
Fig. 33.
Diagram illustrating the Mendelian Scheme of Inheritance.
' N N
= 2 &
3 NN we
g- §ea Bese
Nes Pe 2 Su 3 Sk
. ABS RS
£ Ny_\N
§ ee SS cm wee
aS \
8 _N
N N N
S 7
: {N xx
ws Bee
xy a og Ow || NY
ag ac
aa qa
aoa ag
oe Xx
aa aa
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 57
The Mendelian scheme of inheritance has been found
to hold good for a great diversity of characters in plants and
animals such as the absence or presence of horns in cattle,
the pea comb and the single comb in fowls, the absence or
presence of the waltzing habit in mice, and susceptibility or
resistance to rust-disease in wheat, to mention only a few.
So far, we have considered the case of only one pair of
differentiating characters in an individual, but the same re-
sults occur in the case of any number of pairs of characters.
In the case of two pairs of differentiating characters we get,
in the first generation of the hybrids, individuals all showing
the two dominant characters. In the second generation we
get nine individuals showing both dominants, three showing
one dominant and one recessive, three showing the other
dominant and the other recessive, and one showing both
recessives. But it is not so easy to trace the results when
there are several interacting factors modifying the same
part or structure, or when the factors concerned fail to cor-
respond with the characters that appear in the zygote, such
as factors for inhibiting or developing colour,
Further complications are met with as the result of the
repulsion and coupling of certain factors, including some-
times the factors for sex, the inheritance of which in some
cases it appears to be possible to express in Mendelian terms.
It is often ‘hard to trace the inheritance of utility characters
because they frequently are the result of many factors with
differences so fine that they can hardly be recognised.
The study of Mendelism in the bee is hampered by
several special difficulties. First, we cannot contro] mating
in the ordinary way. Then there is the parthenogenetic
production of the drone, which is likely to have a disturbing
effect. Thirdly, the honey -bee is a highly specialised ani-
mal, and varies very little. There is some variation in size,
the eastern races being smaller than those of the west, but
apart from this the colour of the upper or dorsal side of the
abdomen is the only visible character that varies strikingly.
The variation consists in the extent to which the two colours,
. yellow and black, displace one another.
Turning our attention, firstly, to the workers, we find
that in Apis indica, and in the artificial varieties known as
golden bees, the yellow extends over the three basal
58 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
a
ww
BRITISH GOLDEN.? /NTERMEDIATE.?° BLACK.9
BRITISH GOLDEN. & {TALIAN.S
Fig. 34.
Diagram showing Colouring of abdomen of Workers and Drones.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 59
fig. 4.
ra
=
VW
BRITISH GOLDEN.2 /NTERMEDIATE. 2
ew Fa. 8 ~— 4
LEE, 19. _ Se x
Gey
a’
‘oe
Vv
NEW GOLDEN ®&S.
Fig. 34a.
Diagram showing Colouring of abdomen of Queens.
60 (JUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
segments, and more or less of the basal part of the fourth seg-
ment. The scutellum on the posterior part of the thorax is
also yellow. Extreme goldens, with the fourth segment
entirely, and the fifth segment more or less, yellow, have also
been bred, but it appears that they do not breed true. In
Italians the three basal segments are bordered at the edges
with black and the scutellum is darker. Italians from the
Swiss Alps have the black bands wider than Italians from
the Ligurian Alps, while Cyprians have them narrower. Races
with the abdomen entirely black occur in Britain, France,
Germany, Malta and other places.
From 1901 to ro12 I was engaged, at Ripple Court
Apiary, near Dover, in breeding a golden bee, to which I
gave the name ‘‘ British Golden.’’ This bee was extracted
from crosses between. English blacks, Italians and American
goldens. The golden character was soon isolated, and thence-
forward it was found possible to maintain the pure golden
breed by breeding from queens that produced all goldens,
though, as may be imagined, many of the queens were mated
with blacks and produced hybrids. No attempt was made
to increase the area of the golden colour. The diagram
(Fig. 1 in Fig. 34) shows the colouring of the abdomen of
a pure British Golden worker, It is interesting to compare
this with Fig 4, which is the colouring of the abdomen of a
pure British Golden queen. It will be seen that the yellow
in the queen extends much further than in the worker. The
factor,* or factors, that produce a half yellow and half
black abdomen in the worker produce an almost entirely
yellow one in the queen, There is no difference in the
gametes ; the difference is merely a fluctuation in the zygote
caused by a difference in the quality and quantity of food
supplied in the larval stage. Since the work of breeding
British Goldens was begun in Ripple Court Apiary, in 1902,
a very large number of pure golden queens have been bred ;
about 1,500 of them were kept until their young workers
hatched, and notes were made of the colourmg of these.
These workers were of two types only, golden and _ inter-
mediate (see Figs. 1 & 2 in Fig. 34). Not a single black
worker was seen. Most queens produced a considerable pro-
portion of each type, but some produced all goldens, and
some all intermediates.
* The word “factor” is here used in the Mendelian sense only.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 61
It was evident that the queens that produced all goldens
had been mated by a pure golden drone, and this was con-
firmed by the fact that the all-golden families were most
numerous (1) from the matings that took place at the end
of each season, namely, in August and September, when
most of the drones in neighbouring apiaries had been killed
off and only the golden drones in Ripple Court Apiary re-
mained, and (2) from the matings that took place in cool
aml windy weather, and, therefore, close to the apiary.
Matings of the latter kind I have called by the name of
“restricted matings.’’ Most of them did not take place
until the queens had been hatched twelve to fifteen days.
Fig. 35.
Diagram showing how a slightly restricted range of flight may completely
isolate an apiary for breeding purposes. The dots represent imaginary
apiaries, and the circles ranges of flight. The ranges of flight of queens
and drones are not shown separately.
Ripple Court Apiary is a very favourable spot for re-
stricted mating. The surrounding country is rather destitute
of trees, and is much swept by cool winds, the prevailing
north-easterly and south-westerly winds both blowing off the
open sea, which is four and seven miles off in these respec-
tive directions. Perfectly calm days are rare. On sunny
days in summer, when it is warm inland, the maximum
temperature is generally about 5 degrees to 10 degrees lower and
the wind stronger than in warm places inland. But there
is more sunshine and the nights are warmer than inland.
62 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
The apiary is sheltered from wind by a belt of trees and
shrubs, chiefly Austrian pine, goat willow, sycamore, and
lime. Whichever way the wind blows, there is a sheltered
area just outside the apiary in which, I believe, many queens
have been mated. No bees are kept within half a mile of
Ripple Court Apiary.
There was also evidence to confirm the opinion that the
families consisting of all intermediates were the result of
the union of the golden queens with pure black drones.
Such families were not very numerous from matings that
took place in Ripple Court Apiary, but out of five queens
mated at a spot nearly two miles from the apiary four
produced all intermediates, and one about nine intermediates
to one golden.
Among the families that consisted of both goldens and
intermediates, which it is reasonable to suppose were the
result of mating with heterozygous drones, the two types
appeared in varying proportions. A common proportion was
about seven goldens to three intermediates, perhaps two to
one, but the intermediates were sometimes in excess of the
goldens. A case of go per cent, intermediates has just been
referred to; and, at the other extreme, it may be mentioned
that in 1912 I bred from a queen that produced about thirty
goldens to one intermediate; the proportion of goldens to
intermediates was the same in her queen progeny as in her
worker progeny, and this has been so with every queen
from which I have bred.
The queen corresponding to the intermediate worker is
shown at Fig. 5 (in Fig. 34). Notice that she, too, is
somewhat yellower than the corresponding worker, and that
her scutellum is black, not yellow, as in the golden queen.
The worker offspring of about thirty of these intermediate
queens were examined, and in every case they consisted of
goldens, intermediates, and blacks, thus proving that segre-
gation of golden from black takes place. The proportions
of the three forms varied in different cases, but the inter-
mediates were usually greatly in excess of the goldens and
the blacks. In many cases almost every degree of coloura-
tion between golden and black appeared, but not in equal
numbers.
‘HHAOG UVEN ‘AUVIdVY LUNOD Wada
jvaq ‘uog Y Uyuvig "H fq 010Y4d)
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 63
Out of 475 workers produced by an intermediate queen
bred in Ripple Court Apiary in 1912, practically every
degree of colour occurred.
Eleven had the first three segments of the abdomen
yellow, but the edge of the second segment slightly darkened,
more so at the sides, and the third segment narrowly edged
with black.
Forty-seven had the second segment narrowly edged with
black, the third segment broadly so.
Two hundred and fifty-two had the first segment also
narrowly edged with black, and the second and third seg-
ments more widely so.
Six had the abdomen black, with a yellow smudge across
the second segment. ,
Sixteen had it black, with a large yellow spot on either
side at the base.
Twenty-nine had it black with a small yellow spot on
either side at the base,
One hundred and fourteen had the abdomen entirely
black.
Out of eighty-three workers produced by a lighter inter-
mediate queen, also mated this season, nearly every degree
of colour was found, but the proportions were different.
Six had the first three segments yellow, the third being
narrowly edged with black.
Ten had the second narrowly, and in the middle faintly,
edged with black, and the black edging of the third segment
wider,
Fifty-two had the first segment narrowly edged with
black, and the second and third segments more widely so.
One had the first segment tinged with black, and the
second segment broadly edged with black.
Six had the abdomen black, but a spot on either side
of the second segment at the base yellow.
Eight had the abdomen entirely black.
A few Italian drones were flying in the apiary in r9rz
(the first occasion in ten years), and one or both of these
queens may possibly have been mated by one, but I do not
think it probable. 4
In trying to analyse all these results, we find ourselves
in the dark on a most important point, the drone fathers.
F
64 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
But we can see that they indicate Mendelian inheritance.
Indeed, up to a certain point, the simple Mendelian rule
seems to be followed. The golden queen mated by the
black drone produces the heterozygous intermediate. Mated
by the intermediate, she produces goldens and intermediates,
but no blacks (see Fig. 33). Again, the intermediate mated
by the intermediate produces a small number of goldens,
a large number of intermediates, and a small number of
blacks. But the appearance of every grade of intermediate
in the second generation shows that we are here probably
dealing with more than one factor, though, as Punnett has
shown in the case of the cross between a ‘‘ Silky’ hen and
a ‘*Brown Leghorn’’ cock, there need not be more than
two if it be assumed that they interact on one another in
different ways and to different degrees.
It seems unprofitable to speculate further as to the in-
heritance of the golden and black characters in queen and
worker till more evidence has been collected, and we may
turn our attention to the more practical question of how
far Mendelism can help us in our efforts to improve the
bee. A lesson it teaches us—that is, perhaps, of greater
immediate value than any other—is that if the characters
that we want depend on the heterozygous nature of the
heterozygotes, the way to get them is to breed together the
two pure homozygotes. Thus from the union golden x
black we get all intermediates, whereas from the union.
intermediate x intermediate we get only a proportion of
intermediates.
Fortunately, hampered as bee-breeding is by great
difficulties, the particular union, golden queen x black
drone, is practically attainable on a large scale, and, more
fortunate still, the intermediate produced by it does possess
certain qualities that are very desirable. In the first place,
as in the case of heterozygotes in many plants and animals,
it possesses the added vigour due to the crossing. This
vigour shows itself in great energy, hardiness, and industry
in honey gathering. The hybrids produce larger average
yields of honey per colony than blacks. They are con-
siderably larger than goldens (in both queen and worker)
and slightly larger than blacks. With the cross under
consideration, golden queen by black drone, which is the
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 65
only practicable one in England (the reciprocal cross, golden
3 by black 2, being only a chance production), the colonies
are very populous because they are headed by golden queens,
which are more prolific than blacks. An undesirable con-
sequence of crossing bees is the development of an increased
tendency to sting, but in this particular cross the temper is
usually good, though it becomes hotter in later generations
when the black colour predominates.
Reference has been made to the coupling of factors.
Colour characters are often associated with various qualities
of a useful nature or the reverse. Punnet states that the
National Portrait Gallery furnishes remarkable evidence of
thisin man, Here the pictures of celebrated men and women
are largely grouped according to the vocations in which they
have succeeded. It is rare to find anything but dlve eyes
among the soldiers and sailors, while among the actors,
preachers, and orators the dark eye is predominant, although
for the population as a whole it is far scarcer than the light.
In the honey-bee several qualities are associated with
the golden and black colours. The goldens are more pro-
lific, they are also less hardy and smaller. They make a
peculiar singing sound when they are smoked. These char-
acters I have found inseparable from goldens. It is said
that goldens are greater robbers than blacks, and that they
distribute themselves more to neighbouring hives, but this
I have not proved, and it is certain that they are more often
detected doing these things on account of their bright out-
standing colour than they would be if they resembled the
bees whose hives they enter.
As regards desirable utility characters that are separately
inherited, we are not in the near future likely to make
much progress in unravelling the factors that stand for
them, and even if we could do so, how can we fix them
without controlling mating by isolation? In England there
seems to be only one way, namely, by getting the character
in our golden bee. During the Jast few years I have been
trying to fix certain desirable qualities in my goldens.
Having found the desirable quality in a stock, one must be
prepared to sacrifice all one’s other goldens in order to
give it a chance to get fixed.
By, every year, wintering 30 to 50 of the purely mated
British golden queens bred the previous year, carefully
F2
66 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
comparing their colonies for hardiness and honey gathering in
May and June, and breeding queens and drones from the
best only, I was able to get some improvement in these
directions, and a better bee for crossing with blacks.
A valuable lesson that Mendelism teaches to breeders of
all kinds of plants and animals, and one that the hee-breeder
must not lose sight of, is that, in the words of Punnett,
‘Ceyery possible variety arising from a cross appears in the
second generation if only a sufficient number is raised, and
of all these different varieties a certain proportion of each
is already fixed.’? More can be accomplished by a careful
analysis and isolation of the individuals of this generation
than by years of breeding by selection on the old lines.
The fear of losing the original variety by crossing it is
unfounded, for it can be recovered in a fixed state with all
the superadded vigour that follows from a cross.
We must remember that, underlying Mendelism, is the
doctrine elaborated by Weismann: that characters acquired
during the lifetime of the individual as the result of changes
in treatment or environment cannot be transmitted to the
offspring, though it is true environment may and does exert
selection in individuals carrying different kinds of gametes.
It is, therefore, useless to try to fix acquired characters—
fluctuations, as they are called—by breeding, unless the
treatment that causes them is always applied, as in the case
of worker characters as distinguished from queen characters.
Robbing is generally an acquired character caused by
carelessness on the part of the bee-keeper. Bad temper
induced by improper handling is another case of an acquired
character. Such characters, acquired by accident, need
cause us little concern.
Most of the characters in the bee that we wish to improve
are in the workers. How, it may be asked, can these be
propagated, seeing the workers are sterile? We must do it
through their reproductive sisters—the queens. It is com-
paratively easy to propagate the character if it is recognis-
able in the queens, even though much changed, as, for
instance, the colour character. But we may wish to pro-
pagate a character that is not recognisable in the queen,
such as industry. We may wish, for instance, to get the
queen containing the factors carried by a particularly
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND, 67
industrious worker in a hive where most of the workers are
less industrious. Unfortunately, we have no means of dis-
covering such a queen, and characters of this kind that show
themselves in individual workers are almost sure to be lost
unless we can find them in a large proportion of the workers
in a colony. Tor such characters we are compelled to test
our bees in colonies, not as individuals. This is rather a
serious limitation, for while we can study the characters of
thousands of individual workers, comparatively few colonies
are available. On the other hand, the enormous number
of workers that a queen produces helps us very much in the
study of what gametes she is producing, and as they are
always surrounding her and continue to be produced for
years, we can study them at leisure.
And here I may make a few remarks on estimating the
proportions of the different coloured offspring of a queen.
My practice is to do this, if possible, on the twenty-second
or twenty-third day after the queen begins to lay. Then
only a few hundred of her workers have hatched, and they
can be distinguished at once from the other workers in the
hive by their downy, soft, and immature appearance. At
this stage one can, with practice, estimate fairly accurately
almost at a glance the proportions, if only two types are
present. Often there is a risk of robbing, and then it is
not safe to keep the hive open more than a minute or two.
Later, when there are workers in all stages of immaturity,
it is less easy to estimate the proportions. It is not usually
possible to ascertain the proportions from mature bees until
the spring, and then the results may be rendered inaccurate
by the presence of bees from other hives. For accurate work
it is best to chloroform a few hundred bees, and then pick
out the young ones and count out the different varieties of
them before they have time to recover.
I should like to say a few words on colour inheritance
in drones. Fig. 6 (in Fig. 34) shows a British golden
drone. The drone has seven dorsal segments—one more
than the worker or queen—but only five of these are seen
from above, for the first segment occupies the basal end of
the abdomen, and the last one is underneath. I should
state that British Golden drones vary a little in the extent
of the black on the fourth segment. It is well known that
68 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
the drone is produced parthenogenetically, z.e., without
sexual union. The production of a male by parthenogenesis
is rather unusual in nature. More often, as in Aphids, it is
the female that is produced parthenogenetically, and then
the species can reproduce itself through several successive
generations without fertilisation, and while this kind of re-
production is going on the male disappears completely. But
with the bee this is not so. Fertilisation by the drone is
needed for each fresh generation of workers and queens.
Most of us have proved to our own satisfaction that the
drone can be produced parthenogenetically. A colony loses
its queen in winter, and a new queen is reared, which fails
to get fertilised, with the result that she produces drones
only. But are all the drones produced by a fertilised queen
the result of parthenogenesis? Perez, in 1878, thought not,
for on examining 300 drones produced by an Italian queen,
fertilised by a French black drone, he found 149 which he
thought indicated hybridism. It is clear that if it is true
that the drone is always produced parthenogenetically, the
queen, provided her gametes are pure, must produce pure
drones, no matter what kind of a drone has fertilised her.
I have bred drones from about half a dozen of my golden
queens every season for some years. Some of these golden
queens were producing all golden workers, others certain
proportions of intermediates, others all intermediates. Now
the drones from the queens producing all golden workers
were all golden, as shown in Fig. 6, though they varied a
little, as were also the drones from most of the queens
producing some or all intermediate workers, but two of these
queens produced certain proportions of darker drones. One
of these was a queen raised in 1911. The workers she
produced were all intermediates. On May 29th, 1912, I
examined seventy-seven of her drones; twenty-six had the
first four segments largely yellow, ten the fourth segment
smudged with black, twenty-seven had only three segments
yellow, the fourth segment being black, twelve had only
two segments yellow, and two had the abdomen entirely
black, with only the edges of the first and second segments
yellow, One’s first thought in trying to explain this remark-
able result is to suspect that the queen was not producing
pure golden gametes, but the facts that the queen had the
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 69
scutellum and the abdomen almost to the tip yellow, and
that a queen. thus coloured had never been known to produce
a black worker, oppose this view. On the other hand, up
to 1908, golden queens, with the scutellum darkened, were
occasionally produced, and black workers were often bred
from these, indicating they were heterozygous. But latterly
the separation between golden and intermediate has been
more complete, and such queens have not been produced.
This incomplete separation is additional evidence of the
presence of more than one factor for colour. In review of
the situation, the production by a golden queen of dark
drones cannot be said, in the light of our present know-
ledge of the inheritance of colour, to upset the universally
accepted and apparently well-founded theory that the drone
is always produced parthenogenetically, but, in view of the
fact that in all our efforts to breed bees this theory plays a
leading part in guiding the operations, such cases as this
that seem to shake it should receive the fullest investigation.
If we could control mating they would be certain to add
valuable facts to our knowledge of the inheritance of sex.
Fig. 7 is of an Italian drone bred from a queen received
from Bologna. Some of the drones produced by this queen
had a more distinct tinge of yellow on the second segment,
but none showed so greaf an extent of yellow as that ex-
hibited by the British golden drone. It was the great
variation in the colouring of the Italian drone—some are
almost black—that led Perez’s critics—for his statement
raised a storm of opposition—to reject his idea of hybridism.
The inheritance of colour in the Italian bee is remark-
able in two ways. First, the workers all come perfectly
true to a colour pattern very like that of the cross between
golden and black, though somewhat darker as a rule, and
varying in different localities. Secondly, the queens, on the
contrary, show immense variation : some are almost as yellow
as goldens, though they lack the yellow scutellum and they
have at least traces of dark spots on the segments. Others
are broadly banded with black and have the last segmz2nts
black. Are these differences in the queen mere fluctuations,
or do they stand for factors in the gametes which do not
manifest themselves in the workers?
yo (JUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
The breeding true of an intermediate condition of colour
such as uccurs in Italians has been found to be in accord
with Mendelian views in a case where only two factors were
concerned, when it was assumed that they interacted on one
another in a certain way and to different degrees.
Fig, 8a shows a remarkable colouration found in a British
golden, bred in 1912. Fig. 88 shows an unusual colour-
ing in several golden queens reared in August, 1912, from
a British golden queen bred the same year, that produced
all goldens. Whether these are fluctuations caused by cold
or some other agent, or whether they are new colourations,
it is not yet possible to say; but I have always been on the
look-out for variations in goldens in the direction of darken-
ing, for it is probable that only by isolating such a varia-
_tion shall we succeed in much improving the hardiness and
honey-gathering qualities of goldens. That a chill during
the later stages of development darkens the yellow colour
and causes the black to spread in queens, every breeder of
Italians or goldens knows. Fig. 9 shows a curious and
striking distribution of colour that I have obtained in inter-
mediate coloured queens chilled during development.
Till now we have been considering only the ground colour
of the abdomen. But there is another character that greatly
affects its appearance in the worker, and that is the presence
or absence of a pronounced band of short white hair on
each segment, except the first and the last. This band is
well developed in the Italian bee, but feebly so in the
English black bee. The only outstanding difference between
the appearance of the English bee and that of the Carniolan
is the high degree to which these bands are developed in
the latter race. It would be interesting to ascertain if the
inheritance of these bands follows Mendelian rules.
I am not without hope that swarming and even stinging
may be eliminated by breeding.
In nature, the vast majority of queens are reared in
colonies that swarm, but by modern methods of queen-breed-
ing, colonies that never swarm may be bred from, British
goldens that had been bred artificially through at least ten
successive generations, regardless of swarming, were very un-
certain in the way they swarmed. The swarms often issued
late in the season and many returned to the hive without
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. qt
settling. It is possible that this erratic behaviour is the
result of the commencement of a disassociation of the units
that go to make up the swarming impulse.
‘« Stingless’’ bees, in the sense that they do not insert
their stings into human beings, are common in Asia, and
there seems to be no reason why they should not be accli-
matised in Britain or in any other bee-keeping country.
When investigating the bees of India, in 1897, I paid a visit
to the apiary of native bees kept at the gaol at Darjeeling
(altitude 7,000 feet), in the Eastern Himalayas. These bees
were always handled without the use of either smoke or
veil, I myself examined a hive in this way, and I handled
the bees roughly to see if it was possible to get them to
sting, but it was not. An angry swarm gathered around
my hat and head, and after I had left the hive twenty or
thirty bees followed me wherever I went, but I gradually
got rid of them by dodging behind bushes.
It would seem that stinging, which is really an act of
defence, depends upon two characters, which may be in-
herited separately, (1) the flying to the molester and (2) the
insertion of the sting into him. In our Western bees both
of these characters are present, the former one in a modified
degree. The Himalaya bees possess only the first. They
only threaten to sting. But in honey-gathering they are
probably much inferior to the European races,
In conclusion, I would again draw attention to the value
of the bee produced in the first generation of a cross between
two distinct breeds. When a bee-keeper introduces a new
race or breed into his apiary he has two, not one, new bees
to study, the pure breed and the half-breed, and in addition
the host of varieties that follow in the second and later
generations. The generality of bee-keepers do not sufficiently
distinguish between pure breds and half-breds. The term
‘‘Ttalian,’’ for instance, is often applied indiscriminately
to the young of an imported Italian queen, and the young
of her daughters, reared and mated in Britain, and even
sometimes to the later generations—in fact, to any bee that
shows yellow bands. In this way many observations that
have been made about Italians have failed to be of value,
and have even been in conflict, one bee-keeper blaming them
92 (JUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
for lacking the very qualities that another bee-keeper praises
them for possessing.
One of the best qualities of Italians is their undoubted
power of resistance to the disease that, in America, is known
as ‘‘ European Foul Brood,’’ and I may now call ‘‘ melt-
ing foul brood’’ to distinguish it from the ropy form.
Whether this most useful quality is shared by the Italian-
English half-breds, and, if so, to what degree, it would be
well worth while to try to discover. The bee-breeder
might succeed, with the aid of Mendelian methods, in
separating a highly resistant strain, just as Professor Biffen,
of Cambridge, has by this means been enabled to bring out
a rust-resisting variety of wheat. We might, perhaps, breed
a strain to resist what has proved in some parts of Britain
to be a still greater scourge, the ‘‘ Isle of Wight’’ disease.
The fixed types of bees that occur in nature in different
localities should always be named after the localities from
which they come, for variation in appearance is so limited
that it often fails to enable one to separate one type from
another.
An account of the work of breeding the British golden
bee in Ripple Court Apiary was published in the British
Bee Journal in December, 1909.
Those who wish to know more about Mendelism should
read Professor Punnett’s book, entitled ‘‘ Mendelism.”’
fase
APPENDIX.
A SCENT-PRODUCING ORGAN IN THE ABDOMEN
OF THE WORKER HONEY-BEE.
It has long been known that bees, under certain con-
ditions, particularly when swarming, will often, in vibrating
their wings, make a peculiar hum, and that in so doing
they attract their comrades, The attractive power has been
supposed to lie in the sound of the hum, but some observa-
tions that I have made have led me to the belief that it is
at least partly due to a scent which is emitted from a
membrane situate between the fifth and sixth dorsal seg-
ments of the abdomen. Ordinarily, this membrane is covered
by the fifth segment, but whenever the humming takes place
it is exposed and the scent is then given off.* The scent is
pungent and suggests a mixture of that of iodine with that
of formic acid. When humming and exposing the mem-
brane, the bee stands in a particular attitude, the legs are
extended and the tip of the abdomen is much raised, so that
the exposed membrane occupies an elevated position. No
doubt the vibration of the wings close to the elevated mem-
brane distributes the scent in a very perfect manner.t
I first noticed the scent during the hiving of a swarm in
July, t900, when hundreds of bees were exposing the mem-
brane. In March, 1901, while dissecting the abdomens f
several freshly-killed bees, I noticed that one of them, ev
out the same scent. I then separated the membrane of this
specimen with as little of the surrounding integument as
possible, and placed it upon a piece of card. Here it
emitted the scent strongly for some minutes, whereas the
test of the abdomen had no smell. On repeating the experi-
ment with another abdomen, a similar result was obtained,
but I found that not every specimen produced the scent.
By squeezing the abdomen of a freshly-killed bee so that
mombraie takes place ay abe entrance of tho hive in very nol westhion
This is evidently for ventilation. — aie
The legs are extended, the tip of the abdomen raised, and the wings
vibrated feebly by the bees that thrust out their sti in alarm when a
hive is opened, ‘ihe sting poison, which gathers in little drops on the tips
of the stings, has a strong scent, which resembles that of jargonelle, and
has the effect of alarming other bees and inducing them to sting.
Fae QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
the tip is distended, a very good view of the membrane can
he obtained (see Fig. 36 a). It is soft and semi-transparent.
The portion d has a milky-white appearance, and under the
microscope it appears to be finely rugulose or covered with a
large number of minute vesicules. At ¢c, where the mem-
brane joins the basal portion of the sixth segment, there is a
long narrow channel, the basal part of which is also rugulose,
Fig. %6.
Tip of Distended Abdomen of Worker Honey Bee seen from above,
enlarged.
4p, 5p, 6D.—Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Dorsal Segments.
6v.—Sixth Ventral Segment.
A.—Membrane. b.—Rugulose portion. c.—Nassanoff’s canal.
It is the portion 2 and the channel ¢ that are exposed when
the bee is humming. It seems probable that the scent is pro-
duced by a liquid that is secreted in, and emitted from, the
rugulose portion.
The organ in question appears to have been first noticed
in the year 1883, when Nassanoff, of Moscow, decribed it,
and an account of his description was sent by Zoubareff to
the Swiss Bulletin a’ A piculture.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 75
The organ is described as a canal. ‘‘ At the bottom of
this canal a large number of small glands open, each one of
which has an oval cell with a well-defined globule. From
each cell a duct starts out, and extends to the bottom of the
canal.’’ Nassanoff further said that the walls of the duct
are of a chitinous texture. He assigned a secretory function
to the glands, and suggested that they produced the perspira-
tion. Zoubareff thought that the excess of moisture that is
contained in nectar freshly gathered from flowers might be
voided by these glands.*
The humming, accompanied by the exposure of the mem-
brane and production of the scent, takes place under the
following several conditions:—
1. Ina swarm, before it has settled down in its new
hive. Here it is performed very freely, especially by the
bees surrounding the queen when the main body of bees is
separated from her, also by the bees that are the first to
enter the new hive. The scent, when produced by a swarm,
is very strong, and the attractive effect of the bees emitting
it is very great. This effect is well seen if one removes the
queen for about fifteen minutes and then places her in a spot
a few yards from where the swarm is. As soon as a few
bees discover the queen they settle close to her, and at once
commence humming and exposing the membrane.t This
soon attracts other bees, and these also hum and expose the
membrane, with the result that the whole swarm is quickly
drawn to the queen,
2. At the flight-hole of a hive. Here the action is per-
formed either (a) by bees that are returning tired or be-
numbed by cold from the fields to the hive, this being chiefly
in the evening or in unfavourable weather ; or (2) by young
bees on returning from their first flight, a number of these
usually flying together about midday when weather is favour-
able; or (c) by some of the bees that are returning to their
hive after their first flight following a long confinement in
the hive, as in winter. In each of these cases the bees have
been uncertain as to the exact position of the entrance to
their hive, but when they discover it, no matter how feeble
* See “The Honey Bee,” by T. W. Cowan, 2nd ed., pp. 94 and 95. |
+ The queen herself has a strong attractive power, but the attractive
power of a body of workers without her can easily be seen.
76 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
their condition may be, they will commence to hum and to
expose the membrane, This action no doubt excites and
warms them. It is usually intermittent, each interval being
occupied in taking a few steps towards the interior of the
hive ; finally the bee disappears inside.
3. In certain artificial operations, such as when bees
are being ‘‘driven’’ from one hive into another, or when
a number of bees are shaken into a box or on to the alight-
ing board of the hive, (This is one of the simplest ways of
demonstrating the phenomenon. )*
Under all these conditions there is a risk of loss of many
bees either by their isolation, which may mean death by cold
or starvation, or by their entering by mistake the wrong
hive in which they may be killed, and it is the bees that
have escaped from these dangers that attract the others still
exposed to them; they draw them to the place of greatest
safety, either to the queen or to the interior of the hive,
or, when these places are not known, to where there is a
large number of bees. A result of this arrangement is that
when the number of bees in danger of failing to reach the
place of safety is increased, these bees are more strongly
attracted to it, because the number of those which succeed
in reaching it is increased, and so large numbers of bees
are not easily lost, A certain number of tired or young
bees make themselves attractive as they enter the hive on
almost every day when bees are flying, and no doubt during
the whole season the loss of a very large number of bees
is prevented by this action.
A constant waving of the antenne during the humming
and exposure of the scent-producing organ indicates that the
attractive impression is received by the antenne.t
*The “roaring ’”’ of qucenless bees is also accompanied by exposure of
the scent organ. Here its use would seem to be to attract the lost oueen.
+ That the antenne are used bv hees for perceiving smells is shown,
I think clearly hv the following incident. In May, 1895, I captured a
aueen of the bee Psithyrus vestalis in the act of searching for a colony
of the humble-bee. Bombus terrestris. in the nest of which P. resfalis
breeds. I put her into a glass jar in which I had kept some terrestris
aueens for several hevrs en that the jar had acquired the characteristic
odour of this bee. The Psithyrus queen showed plainly that she under-
stood that terrestris aueens had been in the jar for she ran about in
great excitement, stroking the interior of the jar with her antenne.
apparently trving to trace the nath the queens had taken. After a few
minutes hunting she flew out of the jar. but finding she had Jost the
scent, she returned almost immediately to search again inside.
77
HOW POLLEN IS COLLECTED BY THE HONEY-
BEE AND BUMBLE-BEE,
THE PART PLAYED IN THE PROCESS BY THE AURICLE.
All are familiar with the masses of pollen—red, yellow
or white as a rule, but occasionally crimson, green, brown
or black—that the bees collect and carry home on their legs,
Catch a bee and you will see that the mass is attached to
the outer side of a certain joint, namely the tibia or shank
(1, Fig. 37) of the hind legs. The outer side of this joint
has its surface smooth and nearly flat. Surrounding it is a
wall of stiff bristles (9, 9) which hold in the pollen in the
same way that the stakes that the farmer places round his
wagon hold in a load of hay. This pollen basket was called
by Kirby the corbicula.
Let us now turn our attention to the next joint below the
tibia, namely the metatarsus.* (2, Fig. 37). This joint
which may be described as a rectangular plate, has its upper
basal corner produced into a peculiar ear-like process (5,
Fig. 37), which Kirby called the auricle. The function
of the auricle appears never to have been closely studied,
though Kirby, on page 210 of his Monographia Apum
Anglia, vol. I,, published in 1802, suspected that it assisted
in ‘‘ kneading the pollen grains into a paste.’’? Subsequently,
however, its use in the honey-bee came to be regarded as
forming with the end of the tibia, which is shaped to receive
it, a pair of pincers to seize and remove the wax scales that
form on the underside of the abdomen and this function is
assigned to it in several of the present-day text-books on the
honey-bee. In 1or11, feeling dissatisfied with this explana-
tion, more particularly because the wax of the bumble-bee,
which also possesses the auricle, is soft and sticky, I
examined the auricle and the adjoining parts in a worker
bumble-bee of the common British species B. ruderatus that
had been captured in the act of collecting pollen, and I
found that the space between the auricle and the end of the
* Called also the planta (Kirby), and the basitarsus (Cockerell). This
is really the first joint of the foot.
Missing Page
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 79
tibia was crammed with pollen, this substance extending in
an unbroken mass into the corbicula. It then occurred to
me that the use of the auricle might be to push the pollen
into the corbicula, and upon looking for confirmation, I
saw a beautiful apparatus for carrying out the work as I had
imagined.
An account of this apparatus and how it evidently works,
was given in an article of mine, published in the British Bee
Journal of Dec. 14, 1911, and in the following spring I
was able to present further evidence to prove that it is
employed in the way there explained. See the British Bee
Journal of April 11, 1912.*
We may commence the study of the process of pollen-
collecting by noting that the metatarsi of all three parts of
legs are clothed on their inner sides with brushes of stiff
bristles. Now these brushes occur in the solitary bees as
well as in the honey-bee and bumble-bee. Their function
is to brush clean the coat of fur that clothes the body, more
especially to clean out of it the pollen with which the bee,
when it visits the flowers, gets dusted. The brushes on the
fore metatarsi are used especially to clean the head and
tongue, the brushes of the middle metatarsi to clean the
thorax, and the brushes of the hind metatarsi the abdomen.
If we catch a honey-bee in the act of collecting pollen we
shall find that the brushes on the hind metatarsi are filled
with pollen made into a paste with some kind of liquid,
and if we taste the pollen we shall be led to conclude, by
its sweetness, that this liquid is honey. Passing over, for
the moment, the question of how the pollen gets moistened
with honey and accumulates on the hind metatarsal brushes,
we may ask: How is it transferred from these brushes to
the corbicula? Cheshire (Bees and Bee-keeping, 1886,
Vol. I., page 131) states that the legs are crossed, and the
metatarsus naturally scrapes its brush on the upper edge
of the opposite tibia, but this I find is not the case. If a
*Dr. D. B. Casteel in a paper published Oct. 4, 1912. as Circular
No, 161 of the Bureau of Entomology of the United States Department
of Agriculture, entitled The Manipulation of the Wax Scales of the Honey
Bee, states that the so-called wax-pincers have nothing whatever to do
with the removal of the wax scales, but that the wax scale is pierced by
a few of the stiff spines on the distal end of the metatarsus and is then
drawn from its pocket and remains adhering to these spines until removed
for mastication. See also The Anatomy of the Honey-bee, 1910, by R. BE.
Snodgrass, p. 68. in
80 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
bee be watched collecting pollen, it will be seen that the
hind legs are never crossed, but that they are constantly
rubbed together in a longitudinal direction. At the end of
the tibia is a comb (3, Fig. 37). When the legs are being
rubbed together the comb of the one leg scrapes the pollen
out of the metatarsal brush of the other leg into the recep
tacle 4, which I have named the excipula. The leg, pre.
viously bent, is now straightened (see Fig. 38), with the
result that the auricle closes on the excipula, compressing
the pollen in it and forcing it up over its edge into the
Fig. 38. Fig. 39.
Figs. 38 and 3. Diagrams to illustrate the working of the corbicula-
loading apparatus in the honey-bee. p, comb; a, auricle, ah, guiding fringe
of hairs on auricle; s, excipula; c, entrance to corbicula.
corbicula at a spot (8) where there is a gap in the sur-
rounding fence of bristles. The auricle bears a fringe of
hairs (7) directing the pollen into the corbicula. This
process is repeated many times with both legs. The result
is that the pollen collects, first at the distal end of the cor-
bicula, then spreads, as it increases, over the floor of the
corbicula, and finally rises and swells into a great lump
bounded by the surrounding fence of bristles. After the
floor of the corbicula has been fairly covered with pollen,
further contributions are forced in as a wedge between the
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 81
surface of the corbicula and the pollen already collected.
This is seen in Fig. 40, which shows a pollen mass in the
corbicula of a honey-bee caught early in April, 1912, con-
sisting of white pollen, to which had been added a little
orange pollen. It is also indicated in Fig. 42, which is
an untouched micrograph of the two loads, cut in half, from
the corbicule of a worker of a bumble-bee, Bombdus terres-
tris, caught on July 23rd, 1912. In the course of loading
View [rom above. Side View. View from beneath,
Fig. 40.
Left leg of British Golden Honey-bee loaded
with two kinds of pollen.
t, tibia bearing the corbicula or pollen-basket.
m, brush on metatarsus. The clear portions of the
loads consist of white pollen (loaded first), the
closely dotted portions of orange pollen (loaded
later), and the remotely dotted portions of pale
orange pollen; the latter, where it is shown
detached from the orange, is on the surface only.
up this bee changed from white pollen to yellow or orange,
and from yellow or orange to white no less than seven times,
and the stratification caused by the successive changes is
very instructive.
The bee keeps the growing load in shape by patting it
occasionally with the metatarsus of the middle leg. The exact
region thus patted is shown in Fig. 40 (middle drawing) as
a remotely dotted area consisting of orange pollen added by
the patting.
82 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
Casteel has lately pointed out that when the pollen grains
are small, and the whole mass in the corbicula is well
moistened, marks made by some of the corbicular bristles
will be seen on the sides of the load. These scratches are
transverse in direction, and show that the mass has been
increased by the addition of pollen pushed up from below.*
The bumble-bee is the only bee besides the honey-bee
outside the tropics that possesses a corbicula, and she loads
it with pollen in essentially the same way as the honey-bee,
but the apparatus employed is less specialised. On refer-
ence to Fig. 41, it will be seen that the bristles comprising
the hind metatarsal brush are arranged, not in rows, but
irregularly, as in the solitary bees. The pollen paste is
found only in the corner of the brush nearest to the auricle,
which is the only part of the brush scraped by the cum.
Only the upper end of the comb comes into contact with
the brush. The teeth at the lower end of the comb are,
in, fact, useless, being slender and hair-like (see Fig. 44),
whereas in the honey-bee every tooth is well formed (Fig. 45).
Indeed, the bumble-bee’s comb shows very plainly that the
teeth of the comb in both bees are nothing more than
specialised hairs. In the bumble-bee the tips of the teeth
form a nearly straight line, but in the honey-bee they form
a convex curve, thereby making the comb an efficient instru-
ment for combing out the whole of the metatarsal brush.
The tibial spurs (Fig. 44, s, s) would impede the working
of so perfect a comb as that of the honey-bee and, though
present in all other bees, are absent in 47s and its tropical
allies, Zvigona and Melipona, At the base of the comb in
each bee is a glabrous or naked area (g), which indicates
by its width what part of the comb is most used.
In the honey-bee the working surface of the auricle is
covered with numerous small pointed teeth (6, Fig. 37) in-
clining in the direction that the pollen moves, but in the
bumble-bee the surface is smooth.
The entrance to the corbicula, named by me the Jimen
(8, Fig. 37) is worth a moment’s attention. In the bumble-
bee its edge is covered with short fluff consisting of fine
branched hairs. Further in stand about three stiff bristles
* The Behaviour of the Honey-bee in Pollen Collecting, by D. B.
Casteel, Ph.D., U.S. Bureau of Entomology, Bulletin No 121, published
Dec. 31, 1912.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
83
Fig. 41.
Pollen collecting apparatus on the hind legs of the humble-bee (Bombus
terrestris, queen).
i Fig. 43.
Fig. 42, Bombus terrestris, queen, end of tibia,
Sections through left hind leg. p, comb or pens 8,
variegated pollen excipula; f, entrance to corbicula; j,
masses from the cor- juncture of tibia with metatarsus (this
bicule of a worker of 1s the ball and socket point, the socket
Bombus_ terrestris. being here shown).
84 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
iy \
ZI \ es
ANON
ASS SOSNS
IS Bomeug
WSR Right/Le i
\ NSS Inner ‘Sicke
NN
\\
\
m
Fig. 44.
Vibial comb of right hind leg of Bombus terrestris, worker, inner side.
3, inner spur; g, pars glabrum; m, metatarsus brush; e, part of metatarsal.
brush that bears moist pollen.
Fig. 45.
Tibial comb of right hind leg of Apis mellifica, worker, inner side.
g, pars glabrum.
Fig. 46. : Fig. 47. .
Distal end of left tibia of Apis Distal end of left tibia of Bombus
mellifica, worker, end view, showing terrestris, worker, end view, show-
excipula and limen; c, comb. ing excipula and limen; c, comb.
QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND. 85
leaning towards the entering stream of pollen. These bristles
form a means of attachment to the corbicula for the pollen
mass before it has grown large enough to be held by the
bristles at the sides. In Ag7s the fluff is scanty, and there
is only one long impeding bristle (10, Fig. 37). In both
bees the entrance to the corbicula is overarched by the bristles
on either side (see Figs. 37 and 43). This arch helps to
support the accumulated mass of pollen while allowing fresh
pollen to pass in freely underneath it.
It is evident that the honey with which the pollen is
moistened comes from the mouth. Some authors have sup-
posed that the honey is removed from the mouth on the
feet, which are thus rendered sticky, so that the pollen dust
clings to them; others that the pollen dust is conveyed to
the mouth to be moistened. It is true that I have found
occasionally a minute ball of moistened pollen in the man-
dibles of pollen-collecting bees, but this might be accounted
for by the fact remarked by Hommell, and later by Craw-
shaw and Casteel, that the mandibles are used to some ex-
tent in collecting pollen from the flowers. In the case of
such flowers as white arabis, wallflower, and red ribes, the
pollen is entirely gathered in the region of the mouth.
Casteel, in his recently published paper, The Behaviour
of the Honey-bee in Pollen Collecting, considers it is ex-
tremely difficult to determine with absolute accuracy the
essential steps involved in the process of adding moisture to
the pollen. He states, however, that the horiey from the
mouth becomes well distributed over the brushes of all the
legs, and that ‘‘ all of these brushes also transport wet pollen
which has come from the mouth parts, and thereby acquire
additional moisture. The auricles and the plante of the
hind legs become particularly wet from this source, since
fluid is squeezed from the wet pollen when it is compressed
between the auricles and the distal ends of the tibia. Dry
pollen which falls upon the body hairs becomes moist when
brought into contact with the wet brushes or with wet pollen.
During the-process of manipulation pollen passes backward
from its point of contact-with the bee toward its resting-
place within the baskets.”’ ;
T have noticed that the pollen on the brushes of the hind
legs is much more moist than that on the brushes of the fore
86 QUEEN-REARING IN ENGLAND.
and middle legs. This greater wetness of the pollen on the.
hind legs may very well be accounted for partly, as Casteel |
points out, by the squeezing of the pollen between the auricle.
and the tibia, and partly by the fact that, by the frequent .
rubbing of the pollen-laden hind legs together with the addi-
tion of little or no dry pollen, the moisture is brought to the
surface, just as when one works up a ball of dough it becomes
sticky and clings to the board and rolling-pin if one does not
keep adding flour.
It is well known that the honey-bee collects propolis in
its corbicule. Thinking it would be impossible for it to
pass such a sticky substance through the leg into the corbicula
as it does pollen, I exposed a propolised quilt in my apiary
to the warm sunshine on a sunny day in March, 1912, and
watched to see what would happen. A bee soon alighted,
and after making several futile attempts, succeeded in
detaching with its mandibles a little bit of propolis. Seizing
the fragment in its fore legs, it dashed it into the left corbi- |
cula with the left middle leg, and immediately afterwards
patted it with the metatarsus of this leg. Further fragments
were detached with the mandibles and the bee succeeded in
dashing many of them into its corbicule in the same manner
as before, some of them being conveyed by the left middle
leg to the left corbicula, and others by the right middle leg
to the right corbicula.
Thus the honey-bee loads its corbicula with propolis in
an entirely different way to that in which it loads it with -
pollen, ;
L, Upcott Gill & Son, Ltd., Drury Lane, London, WC.
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