. Dadant system of beekeeping. Bees. DAD ANT SYSTEM OF BEEKEEPING The Queen The queen, the mother-bee, is fertilized for life, at the age of about 6 to 10 days, in normal circumstances. She is then fitted for a life's production of bees. Her greatest laying comes at the opening of spring, when it is necessary to rear, for the honey harvest, a large number of worker-bees. Early writers assured their readers that a good queen could lay from 200 to 500 eggs per day, and they perhaps wondered whether the reader would believe this as- sertion. But when the inven- tion of movable-frame hives enabled
. Dadant system of beekeeping. Bees. DAD ANT SYSTEM OF BEEKEEPING The Queen The queen, the mother-bee, is fertilized for life, at the age of about 6 to 10 days, in normal circumstances. She is then fitted for a life's production of bees. Her greatest laying comes at the opening of spring, when it is necessary to rear, for the honey harvest, a large number of worker-bees. Early writers assured their readers that a good queen could lay from 200 to 500 eggs per day, and they perhaps wondered whether the reader would believe this as- sertion. But when the inven- tion of movable-frame hives enabled the beekeeper to study the innermost secrets of the bee-hive, it was found Head of the Queen (magnified) that queens of good quality (and we should have no others) could lay more than 3,000 eggs per day, for weeks and months together. This was asserted first by Langstroth and Quinby. Mr. Langstroth stated that he had seen a queen lay, in an observing hive, at the rate of six eggs per minute. We witnessed a similar performance ourselves. It is not necessary that a queen should lay eggs at that speed in order to prove very prolific, since a ten hour day of egg-laying would produce 3600 eggs. Doolittle, one of the bright lights of beekeeping, from 1870 to 1918, asserted that he had had queens that laid as many as 5,000 eggs in 24 hours, for weeks in succession. There is a way by which any one, who owns bees in movable-frame hives, may ascertain how many eggs are laid by a prolific queen, without being compelled to watch her performances. It takes 21 days to carry the newly laid egg, intended for a worker-bee, through the different stages of metamorphosis, to the perfect insect with wings which cuts itself out of the sealed cell. So if we count the number of cells containing brood and eggs, during the height of the breeding season, if the hive be large enough and the queen. Please note that these images are extracted from scanned page images that may have been digitally enh
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1900, bookdecade1920, booksubjectbees, bookyear1920
