BEE NOTES.

Taranaki Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 146000, 5 December 1917, Page 7

BEE NOTES.

(By “Tainui.”) F. Jenkins, Okato. —Mr. R. I. H. Nicholas, 4 Caledonia Street, Hawera; but I think you are too Igto this year. I shall be glad to receive your wax next autumn, with others to send to bo made up. It is cheaper to send a largo lot. 1 collect and distribute tho wax and formation for those who care to ask for the opportunity. E. Shaw.—Only just received your Wa Will correspondents please note that I advertised for “swarms,” not “colonies” of bees.

In answer to several suggestions, I propose to write a series of notes on the questions of bees, their physiology and value in the economy of nature. My notes will bo culled from the best available sources, to which !• shall add notes of observations by local correspondents and ray own experience gained hero in Taranaki. 1 hope to thus answer some questions already asked and to anticipate others. I have to thank Mr. W. P.,Gordon for tho gift of a book on “Bees and How to Manage them,” by John Milton, being a now edition of his work; its date is 1865. The writer gives his own experiences of 20 years with straw skops, and with various attempts to improve tho care and the methods of handling bees during his own time. 1 may add that in some matters we arc not much ahead of the writer’s day. VARIETIES OF BEES. There are several kinds of tho honey bee, viz., the black bco. commonly known as the English or German (this bee is the best known one in New Zealand), the Liqurian or Italian bee, tho Carniolan, Cyprian, Syrian and Albino. KINDS OP BEESTN A HIVE. A hive in a normal condition, during the swarming season, contains three different kinds of bees, viz., tho queen or mother bee, tho drone or male, and the worker (an undeveloped female). But during the winter and early spring only two kinds populate the hive —the queen and the worker bees —tho drones having been expelled. A knowledge of tho hee s natural history seems to be necessary to tho beekeeper ; without such knowledge one is quite in the dark as to the various happenings in the hive. One can loam from books the family or order of insects to which the bee belongs. Ho reads of the anatomy and then the life history, lollowinu 'up by dose observation of one of his’own hives, then the words queen, drone, worker, eggs and larvae have a new moaning, so that the hive becomes an intellectual pleasure, and we arc enabled to make it a greater material asset. The natural habitat of the bee is hollow trees, holes in the rooks, and cavities in clay banks. In Canterbury, on Banks’ Peninsula, I have seen them in all these places, and on many occasions have taken large quantities of honey. Roofs of houses have also a great attraction for the bees. Straw is the material which the British people used for many generations. Some races make baskets of rushes in which they keep their bees, while others have been found who keep them in large earthenware pots. The hive as we know it is quite a modem thing, and has been evolved by tho efforts of men who realised the difficulty of being able to do anything with a hive, wliich it was necessary to destroy before yon could examine or control the inmates. It is most interesting to read of the efforts made and of the various patents invented, and while we smile at some of the earlier efforts we cannot but be grateful for the great benefits we modems have received from the labours of'those dissatisfied pioneers. Next week I propose to deal with the physiology of the queen, or mother bee.