The Italian Alp-bee; or, The gold mine of husbandry / short and practical instructions to breed genuine prolific Italian queens; to multiply them by hundreds in a few months and how to change German hives into Italian

by H. C. Hermann

The Italian bees have decidedly the preference. If a piece of honey is anywhere about, the Italians are sure to be the first to find it out. Long before the black bees fly out, the Italians come, and are industrious until late in autumn, when the black bees have long since ceased to work. Everywhere they scent the honey first, and are therefore the first to discover a weak neighbouring hive and to rob them of their stores.

It is seldom known that an Italian hive will harbour German bees, for the Italians resist an attack much more courageously, and know how to keep their house clear. On the other hand, after a few weeks, Italian bees will be observed to march in and out of German hives, just as if they were quite at home; such is the case if there is only one Italian hive on the stand. The cause is easily explained. The Italians belong to the long-fingered craft, and creep into other hives, probably to look after the stores; then they begin to like the place, and they stop, joining the black people.

In Germany the commencement has been made some years since to keep those bees, but they were only obtained in a bastard condition; many stories go the round about our dear creatures, and virtues and vices are attributed to them which they do not possess.

Some insist that they are larger, others, that they are smaller, and others again, that they are as large as the common black bees. Some say that they do not agree with other bees on the same stand; and some are of the obstinate opinion that the Italian bee is not pure, and has a small portion of German blood, and that it is only by their (the German bee-masters) pains, and careful crossing with their black bee, that a pure race can be produced.

It is often comical how some even make a distinction of degrees of preference, of more or less purity of race. Once a friend of bees wrote to me:—"An Italian queen that we call fine and pure has on the abdomen only a very, very little point, &c."

These good people bother themselves about half or whole, and three quarters or full blood, and many other subtilities, without arriving at the idea that there is no medium pure and impure.

What is not a pure Italian is not Italian at all. If she is Italian she can only produce Italians; but a bastard never; just as a bastard can never produce an Italian. That which is not genuine, is, and remains, spurious.

Once, by the pairing of the Italian bee, brought out of course, there is no other guide but that of the yellow colouring.

"All that have not on the after part a black point and a yellow abdomen, we kill at once as being spurious," is an expression of another bee-cultivator.

Such an incarnate, North-German, Stock-Italian could not be convinced that there, where the home of the Italian bee is, by far the greater number of queens are dark, almost chesnut-brown, and, for all that, there is no difference in the colour of the working bees, whether they be produced by a light or a dark-coloured queen. All Italian Alp-bees have the same distinctive mark, that is, the two orange-red girths, no matter whether dark or light, and a dark queen will just as well produce light ones, as a light one produces dark queens, and the colour has therefore not the least influence on the race, but solely the marks of distinction.