MillerThousand AnswersBeekeepingQuestions.pdf - BioBees

106 DR. miller'sswing out of true at the bottom of the frame, so that it sometimeshappened that at the bottom, the end-bars or bottom-barswere glued together, a very unpleasant annoyance.Freezing of Bees.—Q. Do bees often freeze to death withplenty of stores?A. No; unless the colony is too weak or a small cluster of beesgets caught in a cold spell away from the main cluster.Fruit, Bees Injuring.—Q. Do bees injure sound fruit?A. No, they do not and cannot, since the mandibles of thehoneybee are rounding, and cannot pierce the skins of sound fruit.Tests of this were made at the Ottawa Experiment Station in Ontario,Canada. First, strawberries were tried, then raspberries,neitlier of which were injured.The fruit was placed inside the hives, also in other places easyof access to the bees. Inside the hive the fruit was exposed inthree different positions.(1) Whole fruit without any treatment.(2) "Whole fruit that had been dipped in honey, in one halfthe super.(3) Punctured specimens in the other half the super.A second test of the same kind was made with peaches, pears,plums and grapes."The bees began to work at once both upon the dipped andpunctured fruit. The former was cleaned thoroughly of honeyduring the first night; upon the punctured fruit the bees clusteredthickly, sucking the juice through the punctures as long as theycould obtain any liquid. At the end of six days, all the fruit wascarefully examined. The sound fruit was still uninjured in anyway. The dipped fruit was in like condition, quite sound, butevery vestige of honey had disappeared. The punctured fruit wasbadly mutilated and worthless; beneath each puncture was acavity, and in many instances decay had set in. The experimentwas continued during the following week, the undipped fruitbeing left in the brood-chamber; the dipped fruit was given a newcoating of honey and replaced in the super, and a fresh supply ofpunctured fruit was substituted for that which had been destroyed.",\fter the third week the bees that belonged to the two hives,which had been deprived of all their honey, appeared to be verysluggish, and there were many dead bees about the hives; the