. The American bee keeper. Bee culture; Honey. PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY THE W. T FALCONER MANPG CO. VOL. V. f\PRIL 1895. NO. 4. Giant Bees in India: APIS DORSATA. By Frauk Benton. Two persons have given adverse opinions concerning Apis dorsata, to which the public have been disposed to attach some importance, yet which I believe are open to severe criticism. One of these is the lamented Prof. Frank Cheshire, whose work in the wide field of scientific apiculture is, in the main, worthy of almost unlim- ited praise, but who seems to me to have ventured too far, in this instance, with his theorizing.
. The American bee keeper. Bee culture; Honey. PUBLISHED MONTHLY BY THE W. T FALCONER MANPG CO. VOL. V. f\PRIL 1895. NO. 4. Giant Bees in India: APIS DORSATA. By Frauk Benton. Two persons have given adverse opinions concerning Apis dorsata, to which the public have been disposed to attach some importance, yet which I believe are open to severe criticism. One of these is the lamented Prof. Frank Cheshire, whose work in the wide field of scientific apiculture is, in the main, worthy of almost unlim- ited praise, but who seems to me to have ventured too far, in this instance, with his theorizing. Without ever having seen a live bee of this species he proceeds in about four pages of his book to reason on mechanical, physi- ological, botanical and economic grounds, that larger bees could be of no use to us, and says besides that, " Apis dorsata is known to be a useless ; I cannot notice in full here all of the points he tries to make, though in the proper place it is my intention to do so some time in the future. But having, myself, seen and worked with bees of the species Apis dorsata in their native land, placed them in frame hives and manipulated these colonies—even transpo/ted them to a distant country with me, I am thor- oughly of the opinion that Mr. Che- shire knew nothing of Apis dorsata, nor could he by any sort of reasoning arrive at any opinion as to what they would do when transported to Eng- land or to this country. One of his points I wish however to refer to here. He says, when arguing from a botan- ical standpoint against Apis dorsata : "The build of every floweret is adapt- ed to that of its fertiliser, and, could we suddenly increase the dimensions of our hive-bees, we should throw them out of harmony with the floral world around them, decrease their utility by reducing the number of plants they could fertilise, and dimin- ish equally their value as honey-gath- erei'; To the fact of this interde- pendence between insects a
Size: 2515px × 993px
Photo credit: © Library Book Collection / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1890, booksubjectbeeculture, bookyear1
