Answer to Charles Dadant and Willard J. Davis, in September number of the American Bee Journal, pages 60 and 61.
To commence with Mr. Dadant. He says, first, that “we are all disposed to regard our own ideas as indisputable.”
Answer. Prove all things; then hold fast to the true. Do not condemn before trial. I have been several years experimenting and am satisfied with my method, as a means of procuring natural, prolific, hardy and long-lived queens—far, far ahead of any yet given to the public. It having relieved me from the disappointment and losses heretofore experienced in artificial swarming, with forced or artificial queens, I have freely given my mode to the public, for adoption or rejection, as they see fit. Those who are set in their way, are under no obligation to either adopt or even try my mode; but there are those who are not satisfied with their present light, and who will be benefited by the knowledge of an improved process, and to them my communications are addressed.
He says, second, that I “condemn all artificially raised queens.”
Answer. I do: as against nature, reason, and common sense. I see a difference in a provision of nature, by means of which a swarm, accidentally deprived of its queen, can temporarily replace her, till one can be raised in a more natural way, and the way men in their wisdom are running the race out. You yourself prove my position by almost every line of your article, if you would only place your trials, troubles, vexations, and losses to their right account—forced or artificially raised queens. New brood may seemingly save you for a time; but when all breeders have the cholorosis stamped on the product of their apiaries, like will beget like.
He says, in the third place—“why does friend Price imagine that artificial queens are not as good as natural ones?”
Answer. Because convinced by years of experiment and careful comparison (not hard to see, I assure you) of natural with forced queens raised by the means you have mentioned in your article, and by others not mentioned. Even now I am trying the experiment of raising forced queens from the brood of a pure Italian queen received last spring from a celebrated breeder. But so far I have only succeeded in raising cripples, drone layers, and non-egg-hatching queens. Most of them play out before commencing to lay; yet I have raised them from the egg—not one of them hatching before the sixteenth day.
He says, fourth, after giving away or getting queens from the egg, “I guess this method is as good as, and more simple than, that of friend Price.”
Answer. You would go through every motion that I do, and get two or three queens, worthless in comparison with natural ones; while I would secure from ten to sixty natural ones. If you followed your own method, you would have to divide almost every hive in your apiary, if you got through swarming in any season; while by my method[1] one hive would furnish all the natural queen cells that would be wanted in the largest apiary in the time of natural swarming.
He says, fifth, “a queen hatched from grubs three or four days old is just as good as any.”