BEE NOTES.

Otago Witness, Issue 1847, 15 April 1887, Page 8

BEE NOTES.

Professor A. J. Cook of the Agricultural College of Michigan sends to Gleanings in Bee Culture the following interesting letter, showing that a queen bee will lay enough eggs in a single day to overbalance her own weight : "As I wrote you, we are carefully investigating the laying powers of a queen, and we find that the number of eggs that the queen lays per day is no more surprising than the quantity by weight. Mr Cheshire states that the queen in spring ' -will turn the scales at three grains, feeding adding fully half a grain more ' He says that 90,000 egg weigh 270 grains ; hence 3000, the daily product of a good queen, would weigh nine grains, which would be nearly three times the queen's weight. You expressed doubt, Mr Editor, and no wonder; I have found Nature's laboratory so full of wonders that I have learned to doubt, or at least deny, no statement like this till investigation shows it to be unfounded. My students and I took a queen, three-quarters Syrian and onequarter Carniolan, or about that, and carefully weighed her on scales that weigh to one ten-thousandth of a gram. She was weighed by two separate parties and on different scales, and weighed -2299 grams. Multiply this by 15,434 and we find her weight 3*548 grains. The queen was carefully lifted from the comb while laying. We see, then, that this queen weighed a little more that one-fifth of a gram, or a little more than 3£ grains. We next weighed a piece of comb full of eggs, which had been carefully dusted, both by blowing and by use of a brush. .. It was laid on a smooth dusted board, and handled by metallic forceps. " I then carefully removed 20 eggs, which were carefully weighed. The weight was '0026 of a gram. Multiply this by 150, and we get the' weight of 3000 eggs, the number that a queen will lay in a day at this season. I then- removed 40 more eggs, and again weighed the comb. By substracting this weight of the comb from the original weight we found the weight of 60 eggs, which agreed almost with the weight as determined by weighing the 20 eggs previously. Thus the weight of 3000 eggs is -39 pf a dram, which, reduced to grains, gives six grains. Thus it appears that, in this case, the queen may lay I*7 times her own weight. Unless the eggs vary in weight — and why should they not 7 We shall repeat this experiment with several queens and their eggs. We shall also weigh eggs just laid, and those just ready to hatch, and compare weights." m