Mr. C. Thielmann, in the BEE JOURNAL, says he has bees which
are mostly hybrids, and he does not know where they came
from, but there are Italians 5 miles from him. Another says
he has no black bees, and his queens must be purely mated,
&c.; another that a neighbor has had some 10 or 15 colonies
so many years, breeding in-and-in, but states he manages to
keep his number about the same. Breeding in-and-in with bees,
I am fully convinced, is not much done. Bees are free rovers
and it seems to be their nature or instinct to mate at some
distance from the parent hive.
This question was discussed by one of the speakers at a
bee convention in N. Y. some years ago. He claimed that
in-and-in breeding had a great deal to do with the failures
in bee-keeping, &c. He compared an apiary to a yard of fowls,
in this respect, and that they could be bred in-and-in
until entirely worthless. This may be done, for fowls are
confined to a particular locality, but how is it with prairie
chickens? what is the reason they do not degenerate and run
out? Because they are rovers, like the bee, and are mated by
others from some remote part.
I claim that bees will mix from 5 to 7 miles, and if there
are 50 or 100 colonies within that distance the progeny of a
certain queen will stand a poor show of mating with drones
from its own hive.
To illustrate: While living in N. Y. I obtained one of Mr.
Langstroth's $20 tested Italian queens; I reared some 70
queens and introduced them into as many colonies. The next
season I had Italian drones by the thousand. My stock of
Italian drones were the only ones in the locality, so I had
a good chance to test breeding in-and-in. The next season,
and even that fall, there were hybrid colonies all over the
country, even at the distance of 7 miles, one man had one
colony. One man, 5 miles from me, wished me to introduce an
Italian queen into one of his colonies. I think he had 6 and
I was surprised to see 4 of them hybrids, how they came there
he did not know. Others said to me, “I have your kind of
bees, but where they came from I cannot tell.”
All breeders of Italian queens find it very difficult to
keep their stock up to the standard of purity. I obtained 5
dollar-queens (Italians) from a breeder in N. Y., which when
tested proved to be hybrids, showing conclusively that there
were black bees in that section.
Osakis, Minn.
For the American Bee Journal.
How to Prevent Robbing.