Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee: A Bee Keeper's Manual

by L. L. Langstroth

The formation of one new swarm from two old colonies, may, of course, be very much simplified by the use of my hives. The two old hives are first opened and sprinkled, and the bees taken from them and put into the new hive in the same way in which the process was conducted when only one colony was expelled, some brood comb being given to the united family. There will be no difficulty in rightly proportioning the bees; one queen may always be caught and preserved, and the operation may be performed at any time when the sun is above the horizon. I have no doubt that those who have a strong stock of bees, and who are anxious to realize the largest profits in honey, will find this mode of increase, by far the simplest and best. If judiciously practiced, they will find that their colonies may always be kept powerful, and that they may be managed with very great economy in time and labor. As Apiarians may be so situated as to wish to increase their bees quite rapidly, I shall give such methods as from numerous experiments, many of them conducted on a large scale, I have found to be the best. I wish it however to be most distinctly understood, that I do not consider very rapid multiplication as likely to succeed, except in the hands of skillful Apiarians; and under ordinary circumstances it requires too much time, care and honey, to be of very great practical value. Its chief merit consists in the short time which it requires to build up an Apiary. After trying my mode of management for a few seasons, a bee-keeper may find out, that he is in all respects, favorably situated for taking care of a large stock of bees. Suppose him to have acquired both skill and confidence, and that he has ten powerful colonies. If he is willing to do without surplus honey for one season, and the honey-harvest should be very productive, he may without feeding, and without very much labor, safely increase his ten colonies to thirty. If he chooses to feed largely, he may possibly end the season with fifty or sixty, or even more; but he will probably end it in such a manner as most thoroughly to disgust him with his folly, and to teach him that in bee-keeping, as well as in other things, "Haste makes waste."

On the supposition that by the time the fruit-trees are in blossom, the Apiarian has, in hives of my construction, ten powerful colonies, let him select four of the strongest, and make from each a forced swarm. He will now have four queenless colonies, which will at once, proceed to supply themselves with a young queen. In about ten days, he may make from his other six stocks, six more forced swarms. He will probably find in making these, many sealed queens, if he has delayed the operation until about swarming time; so that he may give to each of the six stocks from which he has expelled a swarm, the means of soon obtaining another. If he has not enough for this purpose, he must take the required number from the four stocks which are raising young queens, the exact condition of which ought to have been previously ascertained. Some of these stocks will be found to contain a large number of queen cells. Huber, in one of his experiments, found twenty-four in one hive, and even a larger number has sometimes been reared by a single colony. As the Apiarian will always have many more queens than are wanted, he ought to select those combs which contain a sealed queen, so as to secure say, about fifteen combs, each of which has one or more queens. If necessary, he can cut out some of the cells, and adjust them in the manner previously described. Each comb containing a sealed queen must be put with all the bees adhering to it, into an empty hive; and by a divider, or movable partition, they must be confined to about one quarter of the hive; water should be given to them, and honey, if none is contained in the comb. I always prefer to select a comb which contains a large number of workers almost mature, and some of which are just beginning to hatch, so that even if a considerable number of the bees should return to the parent stock, after their liberty is given them, there will still be a sufficient number hatched, to attend to the young, and especially to watch over the maturing queens. If the comb contains a large number of bees just emerging from their cells, I prefer to confine them only one day, otherwise I keep them shut up until about an hour before sunset of the third day. The hives containing the small colonies, ought, if they are not well protected by being made double, to be set where they are thoroughly sheltered from the intense heat of the sun; and the ventilators should give them an abundance of air. They should also be closed in such a manner, as to keep the interior in entire darkness, so that the bees may not become too uneasy during their confinement. I accomplish this by shutting up their entrance, and replacing their front board, just as though I were intending to put them into winter quarters.

These small colonies I shall call nuclei, and the system of forming stocks from them, my nucleus system; and before I describe this system more particularly, I shall show other ways in which the nuclei can be formed. If the Apiarian chooses, he can take a frame containing bees just ready to mature, and eggs and young worms, all of the worker kind, together with the old bees which cluster on it, and shut them up in the manner previously described; even if he has no sealed queen to give them. If all things are favorable, they will set about raising a queen in a few hours. I once took not more than a tea-cup full of bees and confined them with a small piece of brood comb in a dark place, and found that in about an hour's time, they had begun to enlarge some of the cells, to raise a new queen! If the Apiarian has sealed queens on hand, they ought, by all means, to be given to the nuclei, in order to save all the time possible.

I sometimes make these nuclei as follows. The suitable comb with bees &c., is taken from a stock-hive, and set in an empty one, made to stand partly in the place of the old hive, which, of course, must previously be moved a little on one side. In this way, I am able to direct a considerable number of the bees from the old stock to my nucleus, and the necessity of shutting it up, is done away with. If the bees from the old stock do not enter the small one, in sufficient numbers, I sometimes close their hive, so that the returning bees can find no other place to enter. My object is not to catch up a large number of bees. For reasons previously assigned, I do not want enough to build new comb, but only enough to adhere to the removed comb, and raise a new queen from the brood, or develop the sealed one which has been given them. A short time after one nucleus has in this way, been formed, another may be made by moving the old hive again, and so a third or fourth, if so many are wanted. This plan requires considerable skill and experience, to secure the right number of bees, without getting too many.

If bees are to be made to enter a new hive, by removing the old one from its stand, it will always be very desirable not only to have the new one contain a piece of comb, but a considerable number of bees clustered on that comb. I repeatedly found my bees, after entering the hive, refuse to have anything to do with the brood comb, and for a long time, I was unable to conjecture the cause; until I ascertained that they were dissatisfied with its deserted appearance, and that, by taking the precaution to have it well covered with bees, I seldom failed to reconcile them to my system of forced colonization. I can usually tell, in less than two minutes, whether the operation will succeed or not. If the returning bees are content, they will, however much agitated at first, soon begin to join the cluster on the comb; while if they are dissatisfied, they will abandon the hive, and nearly all the bees that were originally on the comb, will leave with them. They seem capricious in this matter, and are sometimes so very self-willed, that they refuse to have anything to do with the brood comb, when I can see no good reason why they should be so rebellious.

I shall here state some conjectures which have occurred to me on this subject. Is it absolutely certain that bees can raise a queen from any egg or young larva which would produce a worker? Or if this is possible, is it certain that any kind of workers can accomplish this? Huber ascertained to his own satisfaction that there were two kinds of workers in a hive. He thus describes them.

"One of these is, in general, destined for the elaboration of wax, and its size is considerably enlarged when full of honey; the other immediately imparts what it has collected to its companions, its abdomen undergoes no sensible change, or it retains only the honey necessary for its own subsistence. The particular function of the bees of this kind is to take care of the young, for they are not charged with provisioning the hive. In opposition to the wax workers, we shall call them small bees or nurses."

"Although the external difference be inconsiderable, this is not an imaginary distinction. Anatomical observations prove that the capacity of the stomach is not the same—experiments have ascertained that one of the species cannot fulfil all the functions shared among the workers of a hive. We painted those of each class with different colors, in order to study their proceedings; and these were not interchanged. In another experiment, after supplying a hive deprived of a queen with brood and pollen, we saw the small bees quickly occupied in nutrition of the larvæ, while those of the wax working class neglected them. Small bees also produce wax, but in a very inferior quantity to what is elaborated by the real wax workers."

Now if these statements can be relied on, and thus far I have nearly always found Huber's statements, where-ever I had an opportunity to test them, to be most wonderfully reliable, then it may be that when bees refuse to cluster on the brood comb and to proceed at once to rear a new queen, it is because they find that some of the conditions necessary for success are wanting. Either there may not be a sufficient number of wax-workers, to enlarge the cells, or a sufficient number of nurses to take charge of the larvæ; or it may be that the cells contain only young wax-workers which cannot be developed into queens, or only young nurses, which may be in the same predicament.

If any of my readers imagine that the work of carefully experimenting, in order to establish facts upon the solid basis of complete demonstration, is an easy work, let them attempt now to prove or disprove the truth of any or all of my conjectures upon this single topic. They will probably find the task more difficult than to blot over whole quires and reams of paper with careless assertions.