BEE-spoke-data/bees-v0 huggingface dataset:
I have this day witnessed the act of copulation between a queen and a drone. About 230 ojclock on the afternoon of Thursday, July 21, I was standing near a fertilizing-box filling feeder when my attention was attracted by an unusual common in the way of extra loud buzzing, as of drones on the wing. I looked and saw a queen rapidly flying toward the fertilizing-box, evidently her home. She was closely followed by two drones, one of which turned and fleve off, but the other remained in pursuit. They were flying not six inches from the ground, and were not over eight feet from the fertilizing-box when the act took place. It was done so quickly that I marveled at it, and I wish here to record the facts as I witnessed them. I could not see that the queen was flying in any but the usual way when returning to her hive, but the drone was unusually swift of wing. They were both flying rapidly; and as they fleve the drone made two circles about the queen as though to head her off; and as these circles were made about the queen she rose slightly each time. Directly after making the second circle about the queen the drone fleve at her as a worker flies with the intention of stinging in earnest. His abdomen was curved, and his wings rat ratlied in about the same manner. Directly the drone was in contact with the queen there was a sudden lurch sidewise, and they went together some distance into the field until 1 last sight of them. As they fleve together they much resembled workers when they attempt jointly to bear off their dead. I remained by the fertilizing-box perhaps three minutes, and saw the queen return and enter, being the marks of having met a drone. I still lingered by the hoy, and soon saw a worker bewort the tell-tale white spreck. I later opened the box, and saw the queen bearing the usual thread from male contact. A queen-hee is very swift of wing; but I am convinced that a drone is ten times switter; for to be able to encircle the queen in the manner this one did, such must be the fact.
In the fall of 1876 we saw a swarm of black ants sporting in the sunshine. A close look showed them to be both males and females; and as pair after pair fell to the ground, we had ample opportunity of noting all circumstances. In this case the drones at first seemed paralyzed; but after the queens fleve away, they revived and subsequently few away also. One point here particularly impressed me : The ants of both sexes were in such countless thousands that they must have come from all the ant-hills for, we should say, miles around; the result was, as you see, that there was hardly a possibility of insects from the same family meeting. Now, is there any other way in which the strain of blood could be so effectually crossed with that of some distant colony as by this huge jubilee of both sexes?
Queen-ants, like queen - bees, seldom if ever come out of their homes at any other time, and, as if by some preconcerted arrangement, they meet and mix up apparently for the very purpose of effectually preventing "in-and-in breeding," as it is usually termed when applied to stock. Do questions and drone-bees meet in the same way, in vast numbers? There seems to be no doubt about it, as all known fnets point that way. Drones have been seen in places in larger numbers than we would think could possibly come from one hive ; and many have heard their loud humming who have not seen them. The fact that a queen should become fertilized in so short a time after leaving the hive seems strange, unless it really is a fact that she is called to the swarm of drones by their loud humming, which she would instinctively recognize from a long distance. Flying among them she meets the drone face to face, falls to the ground, tears herself loose from her dead mate by whirling, and then returns to her hive, having been absent only a few minutes.
Does the phone have only one parent?
One of the most wonderful things about the drone, or male bee, is that it is hateheed from an egg that is unimpregnated. so wonderful indeed is this that the matter was for ages disputed, and is even now, by many who have not looked into the matter and examined the evidence. What we mean by unimpregnated is, that queens that have never met the male bee at all will lay eggs, and these eggs will hateh, but they always produce drones, and never workers. Those who have had the care of poultry are well aware that the hens will lay eggs right along, if no eock is kept in the yard at all; and, if we are not mistaken, a bullet would commence and lay her full quota of eggs, if she had never seen a male bird. Now, nearly the same is true with regard to the queen-bee. If she fails to meet a drone during the first thirty days of her life, she usually begins to lay eggs; but she seldom lays as many, or with the same regularity, as a fertile queen. The eggs a then lays, if she is allowed to sit, never produce any chicks at all. The eggs laid by a queen, under the same circumstances, as we have said before, always produce drones. There is one more fact connected with the common fowl; If a male bird is put into the yard with the hen for one day only, good fertile eggs will be laid for many days, possibly a whole laying. If a Black-Spanish cook should get among a flock of white hens for only a single day, all the eggs laid for many days afterward will produce chicks with more or less black feathers on them. We give these statements from actual facts. The point we wish you to observe is, that the eggs of even the common fowl are fertilized as they are laid by the hen, or possibly a few days before. With the fowls, one meeting with the male bird suffices for the fertilization of an egg daily, for a week or more; with the queen-bee, for her whole life of three or even four years.
We do not know whether the hen has the power of laying fertile or unfertile eggs at will or not; probably not; but we do know that a queen-bee lays both fertilized and unfertilized eggs, alternating from one kind to the other in rapid succession. skiful microscospists have carefully dissected eggs from worker - cells, and found the living spermatzon in numbers from one to five. These living spermatozon were precisely identical with those found in dissecting at mature drone. Again : Every egg a queen lays passes a little sac containing a minute quantity of some fluid; the microscope shows that this fluid contains thousands of these spermatozou. Is it not wonderful that these spermatozou should live four years or more in this little sac, awaiting their turn to be developed into a higher life whenever they should be required to fertilize the egg that is to produce a worker-lee? Very well; now the egg that is taken from a drone-cell contains no trace of spermatozoa. Therefore it, like the unimpregnated egg of the common fowl, should never hatch. strange to say, it _does_ hatch, and produce the drone. The first glimpse we get of the little bit of animated nature is the tiny speck alive at the bottom of the cell. Does he grow out of nothing, without parentage, at least on the paternal side? If his mother was an Italian, he is also an Italian; if a black queen, he is also a black. We shall have to conclude, perhaps, that he is the son of his mother, and nothing more. The egg that has never been impregnated in the usual way, must, after all, have some living germ incorporated in its make-up, and this germ must come only from the mother. The great skill and pro
## Drones
I believe with the microscope, required to make these minute examinations, is such that but one or two have ever succeeded in exploring as far as we have mentioned, and it is somewhat like our investigations in the polar regions. Who among us will educate himself for the work and enry it along?
Drones are also hatched from eggs laid by worker-bees. These drones are usually smaller in size than those from a queen because they are generally reared in worker-cells, and the question as to whether they are capable of fertilizing queens, so as to be of some value, like other drones, is one that we believe has never been decided. Some facts have been brought to light that seem to be pretty good evidence on both sides of the question; but, so far as we know, nothing very definite. We confess that we should not want to make use of them, even if they were good, for we want the strongest, healthiest, and largest drones we can get. For a further account of the mothers of these queer drones, see laying Workers.
After what we have said, you will perhaps see how clear it is that the drones are in no way affected by the fertilization of the queen; or, in other words, that all daughters of a purely fertilized Italian queen produce drones absolutely pure whether they have been fertilized by a black drone or not.
Until the invention and general adoption of foundation we had no easy way of repressing the production of drones in far greater numbers than could ever be desirable. Since the introduction of foundation, however, it is found to be quite an easy matter to make almost every cell in the hive a worker-cell. On the other hand, if we choose we can have a hive filled entirely with drone comb, and a good queen could, we think, be induced to raise nearly, if not quite, a full quart of drones at one time. By this means we can have our drones raised from such stock as we choose, and we can save the vast amount of honey that has so long been wasted by rearing and feeding drones that we do not need. While extracting, we have found as many as several pounds of drone larvae in a single hive; and, to save the honey they would consume as soon as hatched, we used to shave their heads off with a very sharp knife. This is certainly rather expensive business, for it must take more than a round of honey, to say nothing of the value of the pollen, to get up a pound of sealed brood. If all this labor and material had been utilized in the production of worker-brood, it would doubtless have been equivalent to a swarm of bees. All-worker comb would have insured this without trouble.
This general subject is covered in a more technical article entitled Partheonegenesis elsewhere in this book, and also under head of Queens.
how to make bees build all worker comb when only starters are used.
Where one can not afford the expense of full sheets of foundation it is well to know how to make the bees eliminate all drone comb. Mr. E. D. Townsend, of Remns, Mich., tells in _Gleanings in Bee Culture_ how this may be accomplished.
The secret seems to be in having just the right number of workers and just the right amount of honey coming in, so that the bees will draw out the combs no faster than the queen can occupy them with brood. As long as this condition lasts we should expect the bees to build worker combs. From this we see that, in order to get good results in comb-building from a natural swarm, this swarm should be of just the right size, and there should be a honey-flow of, say, three or four pounds a day.
We will suppose a large swarm is lived during a period when honey is coming in freely. At this time there is too much honey coming in for the best results in comb-building in the brood-nest, if the whole force of workers is compelled to do all their work in the brood-nest. The remedy is to put most of the workers at work in the supers. Most beginners fall in doing this; but the principle is to make the surplus receeptables more inviting to the workers than the brood-nest, and the bees will immediately go up into the supers on being lived. Our comb-honey super with extensterino-couns at the sides make an ideal arrangement for this very thing.
It is plain to see that, if most of the honey being carried in is placed in the sections, where it should be, the queen will not be the burried to keep pace with the workers, consequently nearly all worker comb will be built. The brood-nest should be filled with comb during the first 23 days after the swarm is haled, for the queen must keep up with the workers and lay in nearly every cell as fast as it is drawn out, or the bees will begin to store honey in the cells. When this condition arrives, the bees, on the supposition that the queen has reached her limit, and that the rest of the combs will be used for storing honey, begin to build the storage size or the drone-cells in the brood-nest. This is likely to occur in about 23 days after the swarm is lived; for by this time the brood is beginning to test out in that part of the hive where the laying began. From this time on the queen has nearly all she can do to keep the cells filled with eggs where the young bees are batching. This means that the comb-building part of the hive is neglected, and that the bees build store or drone comb to a great extent until the hive is filled.
There are artificial ways of handling bees so that they will build good worker combs. I refer to the plan of shaking the bees into an empty hive, in the same way that a swarm is lived. If a colony is divided into nuclei of, say, two or three combs each, and each nucleus given a young queen reared the same year, such little colonies will build very niceworker combs; but the beginner will not be interested in this artificial way of making increase, for he should stick to the natural-warning plan for his increase until such time as he has had experience and made a success of setting a crop of honey. In fact, there are many things to be learned before a beginner should take up artificial ways of making increase.
## 6.1. Renstraining undesirable phones.
Drones undesirable for breeding purposes may be prevented from going out to meet the queens, by keeping them from going out of the hive, or by letting them go out into a eage through which workers can pass and they can not. This is done by taking advantage of the fact that a worker-bee will pass readily through slots in perforated metal where a drone can not. In the figure shown we give the form of the perforated metal.
Zine is the material generally used, because it is cheap and will not rust. Some attempt was made to perforate tin as above, but it proved to be very unsatisfactory.
The oblong holes, as shown below, must be of such a size as to permit the easy passage of workers, but exclude not only drones but even queens (see Comb Honey and Swarming). It is no great task to make the perforations drone - excluding ; but to make them _queen_ - excluding at the same time, and yet not hinder the easy passage of workers, requires a very nice adjustment in the width of the perforations. The first sheet of perforated zinc was cut in England, and imported to this country. This had perforations \(\sfrac{1}{600}\) of an inch in width. While this answered a most excellent purpose, a few claimed that queens would occasionally get through it. To obviate this, zinc was made with the perforations a little narrower.
The width of this was \(\sfrac{3}{8}\) or \(\sfrac{1}{600}\) of an inch. While no queen succeeded in getting honey, they were scarcely able, if at all, to pass through. More recently, perforated zinc has been made in this country on a different pattern, but with perforations exactly \(\sfrac{1800}{1600}\) of an inch in width, or a _triding_ (smaller than the foreign. The reports, as well as our own experience in regard to the perforated zinc as so made, have led us to believe that this size of perforations is about right.
In 1908 there was put on the market a new form of queen-exluder consisting' of wire bars held at the required distances apart by means of soft-metal cross-ties at every two or three inhees. These bars consist of No.
## 6.2. Wood and wire honey-board.
14 hard drawn galvanized wire that has been straightened in a wire-straightener so that it is true as a die. Contrary to what one might expect, the spaces between these bars are more exact than the width of the various perforations in sheet metal. In the process of making, the bars are laid in metal forms having grooves that are spaced exactly right, and then a soft metal in a molten state is made to flow in certain cross-grooves of the metal form. As the metal cools almost instantly, the wires are held at the exact right intervals. The smooth, rounding edges of the bars afford less obstruction to the bees passing and repassing, and it is be
get-worker-broad under good headway, and then, if we put a drone-comb right in the center of the brood-nest, the queen will, if all things are favorable, begin at once to fill it with eggs. The feeding must be keptup, however, for bees are very easily discouraged; and if a stoppage occurs in the daily supplies, they will not hesitate to pull the young drones out of their cells and sacrifice them without mercy.
A queen will seldom produce drones until she is nearly or quite a year old, even though drone comb may be placed in the very center of the brood-chamber.
proves from drone-layers.
queen-breaders find that one or more drone-layers of good stock rearing fully developed drones, if supplied with plenty of worker brood, will furnish a line of nice drones in and out of season; but drones from laying workers, or from queens that have never been fertilized, are to be avoided. Drones from queens that have one-half worker eggs, and then failed, are as good as the drones from any queen.
destruction of ibrones in the fall.
This does not necessarily occur in the fall, but may take place atany time in the summer; and we have several times known the drones killed off between apple-bloom and white clover, only because supplies ceased, causing the bees to become discouraged and give up swarming for the time being. We know of no way in which one can tell so well that the yield of honey has released, as by the behavior of the bees toward their drones. When, in the midst of the honey season, we see a worker buzing along an the basis of a drone that seems to be feeding his best to get away from the like, we may take swarm that the yield of honey is falling, and that we had better stop making artificial swarms, and prepare for feeding, if it is our intention so to do. We do not know that we ever saw bees sting drones, but they sometimes pretend to doso. It is probable that it is only a feat to drive-them away. The poor drone, at such times, after suitably trying to go back into the hive, will sometimes take wing and soar away off in the air, only to return after a time to be repulsed again, until, through weakness perhaps, and want of food, he outhers holelessly in the dust, and so submits to the fate that seems to be a part of the inexstrable law of nature and of this being.
To preserve drones for late queen- rearing, we have been in the habit of carrying all frames containing drone-chamber to some species-like, knowing they would be safe there as long as wanted, even if it were all winter. We believe drones have been, under such circumstances, winted over; but whether they are of any value in the spring or not, we are unable to say. We should fear they would not be by the time questions could be reared. We usually have drones in some of our colonies as soon as April, and that is so early as we should care to undertake to rear questions, in ordinary seasons. We have several seasons reared queens and had them successfully fertilized, even at all the drones had been gone some time, so far we could discover and as they proved to be purely fertilized, we have been not a little-peaked.
Does with smoothly colored hears of different colors.
This is a queer feature in natural history. Almost every summer some one writes up sends ususp-crimes of drones with heads-of different colors. The matter has been reported and commented on at different times in _Glenings_. Not only do we occasionally find drones with white heads, but we find them withheads of a cherry-red color again. We confest there is something very confident and mysterious to us in this matter. Why quest of dance nature should decide to single out the heads of drones to sort with in this way will, it seems to us, be a pretty difficult matter to explain. Why should this peculiarity show itself in the drones more than in the queens and workers? Again, why should _leads_ be the subject of these brightrahimbow colors? Is there really any purpose or design in it? or is it just because it _happened_ color? We present there are very few among our readers but will say there is a purpose and a design in it and the next thing is to decide why it should be so. Here is a conundrum.
**DYSENTERY.** When we see our bees covering the entrances to their hives with a brownish yellow, disregressible-smelling screenent or stain, we may say they have the dyentry, or what is usually known as such. If they weather becomes very warm and pleasant, they will usually get over. It after they have had a full flight If..., the contrary, the strangs show themselves before warm weather, and no opistunity is given them to fly, they may get so far as to cover their combs with this substitute, and finally do it a damp filthy-looking mass.
## Abstract
The real cause is long-continued low temperature, further aggravated by bad food. In order to keep up sufficient animal heat, the bees have to overreact, sneurching their intestines. The long-retained fecal matter results in purging or dysentery. We can hardly think that any food alone would produce the disease, because we rarely, if ever, find the bees suffering from any thing they will gather, in warm summerweather. Honey gathered from rotten fruit, if we may call it honey, is very productive of this complaint, and elder from elder-mills is almost sure to kill bees at the approach of cold weather. We knew a lady who boiled up a manb of sweet apples and fed to the bees, because they were short of stores, and she could not afford to buy sugar for them. They all died of dysentery, long before spring. Where dampness accumulates from their breath, and settles on the combs, diluting the honey, it is very apt to cause these symptoms. Sorghum syrup has brought on a very aggravated form, and _burnt_ candy or sugar is almost sure poison to bees during cold weather, although it may be fed them with impurity in the middle of the summer.
While it is very certain that no such symptoms are found in warm weather, it is also certain that a strong colony in a hive with soft, warm, dry porous walls, will stand an amount of bad food that a weak one, or one exposed to drafts of cold air, will not. We have known bees having considerable stores of elder, to winter very well if the colony were strong enough to keep the whole interior of the hive dry and warm. A powerful colony, if left with their hive uncovered during a rain storm, will soon dry themselves; and while they are doing this they remind one of a study cart-horse as h-shakes the water off his hide and dries h myself by his internal animal heat. While they have the health and numbers to repel moisture in this way, they are safe against almo t any thing. But to help them to keep this internal strength, they should have close and comfortable quarters, very much such as we would need for ourselves to enable us to pass a severe winter's night in health and comfort. The hives often used are so large and barn-like, in respect to the winter's brood-nest, that comforth is almost out of the question, for it does little if any good to pile straw, orn-folder, etc., over the outs of the hives while the cluster within has no scrt of protection at all. If they were in a hollow tree, the diameter of which was so small that they could ill it completely, they would be in a much better place, especially if the sides were lined with soft dry rotten wood. We have seen icicles nearly as large as the arm, in box hives that were tight and large; these had all formed from the condensation of the breath of the bees. Now, should they melt during a thaw, in such a way that this water would run down on the bees and their unsealed stores, it would be very apt to produce unhealthiness, to say nothing further.