A FALLACY CORRECTED

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3822, 16 October 1936, Page 3

A FALLACY CORRECTED

A QUEEN BEE’S MILLION EGGS. A queen bee’s laying capacity has had a great deal of nonsense written and spoken about it. Maeterlinck’s imagination, in his “ Life of the Bee,” ran away with him when he referred to a queen laying millions of eggs; and Cheshire, a great authority in his day, suggested a million and a half as possible. A few years ago a queen bee was reported to have laid 6000 eggs in a day, or four per minute of the 24 hours; but only half that rate would be kept up for any length of time. It must be remembered that for three months of the year the queen lays no eggs at all, or comparatively few; and for another three months the eggs laid amount to only a few hundreds a day at most. Our own best queen (says a Scottish authority) never exceeded 2000 per day for more than six weeks or so. Suppose that that queen, which was a very good one, had kept up that rate for six months, the total would be 360,000, equalling 1000 per day for a year; and if she had kept up that rate for three years she would have had the credit of laying a million eggs. An experience of over fifty years’ hee-keeping in various parts of Scotland and England has convinced us that no queen could keep up that rate, and if any queen has ever, in all her life, laid more than half a million eggs she was worth twenty times her weight in gold.