December SO, 1876. ] 



JOURNAL OF HOKTICULTUEE AND COTTAGE GAEDENER. 



593 



year's prizea. I am certain, not only that a very large quantity 

 of beautiful honeycomb couUl be harvested in such small boxes, 

 bat that a ready market then and there — and if not there, else- 

 where — could be formed which would largely remunerate our 

 bee-keepers, paying them far better than by means of liquid 

 honey, as the former fetches at least three times the price of 

 the latter. Our bee shows will fail in great measure of their 

 object if one result therefrom be not the opening of a market for 

 the sale of honey. Of what use is it to encourage the keeping 

 of bees with no demand for honey, or if the price for it ia ao low 

 as to make it worth nobody's while to collect it? Already in 

 some parts of the country run honey is dear at Hd. or Gd, per lb., 

 whereas it would rise to Is. i)d. or 2s. 6(/. it it were only guaran- 

 teed to be pure honey in the comb, purchasable in moderate 

 quantities, and accessible to the London market. 



I see that in America complaints are already made that honey 

 in quantity, such as is extracted in the larger apiaries by the 

 help of the " slinger," is so cheap as to be a drug in the market, 

 so that one begins to hear thereof "stopping the production 

 of extracted honey;" and the advice is given by a writer in 

 the current number of the "Bee-keeper's Magazine" that "to 

 command the beat prices and most ready sale honey should 

 be stored in glass boxes capable of holding from 2 to 3 lbs. each," 

 I should say from 3 to 5 lbs. each. Another bee-keeper referred 

 to in the same magazine says that, in his opinion, "it is suicidal 

 to secure surplus honey in liquid form, and that if bee-keepers 

 were wise they would make the production of honey in small 

 glass boxes their especial aim in the future." There is sound 

 sense in all this. The only difQculty lies in finding the market. 

 But njethinks if we only had the honeycomb in saleable quan- 

 tities the market would very speedily be found. At present 

 grocers and other tradesmen object to buy or sell honey for no 

 other reason than that it does not come to them in saleable 

 form. They can sell it fast enough, as I have proved in former 

 years; but as it comes to them in large supers or broken up in 

 pans, and necessitates a good deal of manipulation in the divi- 

 sion, it is found so disagreeable to manage, from the stickiness 

 of the honey and the quantity of wasps and bees which it attracts 

 to their shops, that very few grocers who have once been 

 induced to admit it will give it a second year's trial. Thm our 

 market for our best and most highly valued honey is closed 

 against us almost everywhere. Only in large cities, as London, 

 where bees and wasps are practically unknown, and where 

 honey is sold in larger quantities off-hand, is such aale possible. 

 But only let the honeycomb be offered tor sale in compact little 

 boxes which require no manipulation by the " middleman," but 

 will pass directly into the hands of the consumer, and every 

 grocer will be ready enough to buy of the producer. 



But how about those little boxes and their management? 

 There surely can be no difficulty here. Instead of putting one 

 super over a hive let four or six be used at one time, each with 

 its separate communication with the hive below, and all pro- 

 tected and kept warm by a large box fitting over them like a 

 sort of square cap. In good seasons as fast as these are filled 

 they can be taken away, and empty boxes put in their place. 

 A collateral advantage connected with the use of these small 

 supers is this, that whereas in one large super the queen will 

 often spoil the whole of it by occupying a large proportion of the 

 combs with brood, she will rarely be found to have spoiled more 

 than one of the small boxes; because, owing to the difficulty she 

 experiences in passing from one to the other she will mostly 

 remain in the first she happens to visit, or at least sufficiently 

 long to enable the bees to pre-occupy the combs in the others 

 with honey before she makes her appearance there. In America, 

 where honey seems to abound in far larger quantities than with 

 uB^ they sometimes have in use attached to one hive from one 

 to two dozen or more of very small boxes, just big enough to 

 hold 2 or 3 lbs. of honeycomb. These would probably not 

 answer in Great Britain except at rare intervals; but there 

 can be no difficulty or doubt of success where four are used, as 

 advocated here. Now, such boxes would hold from 4 to fi or 

 8 lbs. of honeycomb, according to their size, which would be 

 regulated by the size of the hive or colony over which they were 

 placed. 



As these little boxes would be protected by a substantial 

 covering, they need not be made of wood thicker than half an 

 inch, with one or two small pieces of glass let into their sides. 

 When sold an arrangement might be made for their repurchase 

 when empty if returned in good order. — B. & W. 



EXPERIMENTS WITH HONEY. 



I vvT up six one-pound cans of beautiful linden honey, being 

 careful to make it one homogeneous mass by stirring. It was 

 thrown from the combs by an extractor on July 20th, and put 

 into cans on August 1st. The cans were placed respectively as 

 follows : One in a dark dry cellar, one each under shades of 

 red, vellow, green and blue glass, and the sixth can in full light. 

 On November 8th the honey in the cellar candied to a white. 

 November 22ad to December 10th, honey under coloured shades 



candied, first in the red, next in the yellow, green and blue ; 

 while the honey in full light remaiued transparent until 

 January, when it soon candied after exposure to intensely cold 

 weather. From my experience an equal temperature would 

 preserve certain kinds of honey, while other kinds would candy 

 under almost any circumstances. I think that candied honey, 

 instead of being looked upon with disfavour, should be recog- 

 nised as evidently pure. I hope, however, that the above 

 experiments will lead others to follow up the light theory with 

 beneficial results. — (Scientific Aincrican.) 



THE "WONDERS OF A BEE HIVE.— No. 1. 



Bee life is full of marvels and mysteries. The longer an 

 observing person lives amongst bees, and the more attentively 

 he studies their history, the more readily will he admit his 

 inability to reach the depths and summits of the wonders of a 

 bee hive. After years of patient investigation and close ob- 

 servation the most successful and advanced students of bee-life 

 can do no more than touch the skirts of the garment. Beyond 

 the sphere or limits of man's power or penetration, there is a 

 world of mysteries in a bee hive. An attempt to produce an 

 exhaustive treatise on the subject would be sheer vanity or 

 something worse. In a few letters which I intend to write 

 for the readers of this journal, it is not my intention to go over 

 untrodden ground, but simply to notice and indicate some 

 interesting features of bee history somewhat familiar to ad- 

 vanced apiarians. During the summer months, while bees were 

 busy at work, the pages of the Journal of HoriiculUire gave 

 much information on practical management ; and now when 

 bees are quiet at home let us have a little gossip about queens 

 and drones, their works and ways, their haunts and homes. 



If we begin with queens we shall find marvels great enongh 

 connected with their formation and production, their birth, 

 their life, their end. For what can be more wonderful than 

 the fact that queens are often reared from eggs which might 

 produce working bees, and reared to perfection as queens 

 from eggs in fourteen days, or seven days less time than is 

 required to rear working bees from the same kind of eggs ? 

 Fancy a great number of eggs laid every day in a hive, set in 

 common cells, meant to be nursed there and hatched perfect 

 working bees in twenty-one days — bees possessing instincts 

 and mechanical powers for field labour and household work, 

 also for nursing their young, defending their homes and posses- 

 sions, and for burying their dead. Well, if the queen of this 

 hive die or be removed the bees take a few of the eggs from 

 worker cells, place them in royal cells, or otherwise build royal cells 

 around them, and make or convert them into perfect queen bees 

 in seven days less time than working bees are in their cradle cells. 

 What a marvellous transformation ! Queens are larger, more 

 beautiful (shall I say more perfect ? ) than working bees. The 

 form and colour of their bodies, their instincts and traits of 

 characters, are quite different too. Bees live nine months only ; 

 queens live four years. The immediate cause of such trans- 

 formation and difference appears to be in a substance which 

 the bees place in royal cells as food. What it is, where it is 

 obtained, or how manufactured no one can tell. 



There is perhaps too much taken for established proof in dis- 

 cussing this question. It ia believed by most apiarians and bee 

 historians that special treatment is required in the royal cells 

 only, and hence perfect queens. If inquiring minds seek evidence 

 on this point they cannot find it. If any courageous and sturdy 

 teacher were to stand out and assert that the special treatment is 

 not given to royal infants but to common plebeians, and is applied 

 in the way of stint and constraint to eggs and young in worker 

 cells, who could contradict or disprove his words? That work- 

 ing bees are imperfect females, and queens perfect ones, nobody 

 questions. But which is normal and which is abnormal ? Is it 

 not natural to believe that bees, like other races, produce perfect 

 males and females without special treatment? Is it not as 

 natural to believe that the special treatment dwarfs and cripples 

 workers as it is that it developes the reproductive organs of 

 queens ? What a mystery surrounds this subject ! How little do 

 we know ! What a field there is for future investigation ! The 

 anomaly of having perfect and imperfect females produced and 

 producible from the same eggs puts difficulties in the way of 

 research however honestly and laboriously pursued. All the 

 provisional arrangements and economy of bees are natural and 

 wonderfully perfect, though many of them are concealed from 

 the ken of mortals. — A. Pettigrew. 



HARVESTING HONEY HIVES.— No. 3, 



{Continued from page 522.) 

 Bees, hives, labour, and materials of every description are 

 dearer in America than here, and if it pays there to raise honey 

 at TiZ. per lb., as it evidently does, we certainly can do it 

 here ; but to do it we must advance with the times and bring 

 into use frame hives and the extractor. With regard to the 



