Profitable Bee-Keeping for Small-Holders and Others

By Henry Geary

"Profitable Bee-Keeping for Small-Holders and Others" offers the reader simple tips and guidance on how to set up and manage a beehive for profit. From apiary construction and swarming to marketing honey and beyond, this volume contains everything a modern bee-keeper needs to know about his occupation. Contents include: "The Economy of the Hive", "Stocking an Apiary", "Hives and Appliances", "The Preparation of Frames and Sections", "Feeding Principles", "The Production of Honey", "Natural Swarms", "Marketable Products", "Correct Manipulations", "Mid-season Work", "The Apiarist and his Foes", "Increasing and Uniting", etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction on Bee-keeping.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Home Farm Books
• Release date: Sep 21, 2017
• ISBN: 9781473342484

Book preview

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CHAPTER I

THE ECONOMY OF THE HIVE

BEFORE commencing an explanation of the practical operations connected with bee culture, it will be well to devote a few lines to a brief description of the bee with which we have to deal, and which is indigenous to these islands.

The honey-bee is classed by entomologists as follows: Class, lnsecta; Order, Hymenoptera; Family, Apidœ; Genera, Apis; Species, Mellifica; and finally the various varieties—English, Carniolan, Italian, etc., as the case may be.

The honey-bee is possessed of six legs—anterior, intermediate, and posterior. The posterior legs in the case of workers are fringed with stiff bristles, forming the well-known pollen baskets, in which the pollen is conveyed to the hive. They have two pairs of membranous wings, while the framework of the body consists of an external skeleton composed of a horny substance known as chitine, arranged in the form of segments in the abdomen, each segment being formed by a dorsal and ventral plate. The whole body is more or less thickly covered with hair. There are three distinct kinds of bee in a hive, all of which have much in common, but differ in many important particulars. The drone or male bee is stingless, and is also destitute of pollen baskets; while the queen, the only fully developed female in the hive, possesses a sting, and is also endowed with a series of productive organs. She alone of all the inmates of the hive can perpetuate the race. The worker bee is an undeveloped female, and it is this bee which alone performs the whole of the work in the bee kingdom. She it is who gathers the honey, pollen, propolis and water, feeds the young larvae, builds the combs and protects the colony from attack, finally dying in harness.

A good queen will lay from two to three thousand eggs per day during the height of the breeding season, and she is usually at her best in her second year. After this time she gradually fails, and should be supplanted by a younger mother bee. If left alone the bees will often do this for themselves, but the careful apiarist leaves nothing to chance, and elects to do it for them as a rule. The queen is the centre round which the whole prosperity of the colony revolves, and without good young queens the best results cannot be obtained. She is the mother of the whole of the other inmates of the hive, and has the marvellous ability of laying eggs which will produce at will either drones or worker bees. The queen is absolutely the same as a worker bee at birth, but is reared in a special cell and is fed with special food, and it is this food alone which is supposed to bring about the evolution. The worker bees being debarred from the stimulating food which conduces to the perfection of the queen are rendered physically incapable of mating with the drone, and therefore can never head a colony. The worker bee can lay eggs; and does so at times, but these eggs produce drones only.

WORKER BROOD

A fine Comb containing practically no drone cells

INTERIOR OF A STRAW SKEP

Note the irregular formation of natural Combs

This curious feature of reproduction without fecundation is known as parthenogenesis.

The eggs laid by the queen hatch on the third day, and after passing through the larval and chrysalis stages peculiar to insects, the fully-developed bee hatches on the fifteenth or sixteenth day if it be a queen, on the twenty-first day if a worker, and on the twenty-fourth day if it be a drone. These dates are taken from the time the egg is laid.

A short survey has now been given of the life-history of the bee and of its anatomy. This account is sufficiently full for inclusion in a practical manual, and now we will take the course of events which have place in a normal colony during a season’s working. By this means the following chapters will be readily understood and easily put into