26 
SPECIAL CROPS FOR HONEY ALONE NOT PROFITABLE. 
With a small apiary, planting for honey alone certainly can not be 
made profitable. Small plats of honey-producing plants are valuable 
mainly because they afford an opportunity of observing when and 
under what circumstances the bees work on certain blossoms, and for 
the purpose of determining what might be depended upon to fill a gap 
in the honey resources of a given locality whenever the size of the 
apiary might make this a consideration of some importance. Even 
with a large apiary probably no case exists in which, in the present 
condition of the subject, planting for honey alone would prove profit- 
able. But when selecting crops for cultivation for other purposes, or 
shrubs and trees for planting, the bee keeper should of course choose 
such as will also furnish honey at a time when pasturage for his bees 
would otherwise be wanting. 
As complete a list as possible should be made of the plants and trees 
visited by honeybees, and notes should be added as to period of blos- 
soming, importance of yield, whether honey or pollen or both of these 
are collected, quality of the product, etc. If gaps occur during which 
no natural forage abounds for the bees, some crop can usually be 
selected which will fill the interval, and, while supplying a continuous 
succession of honey-yielding blossoms for the bees, will give in addition 
a yield of fruit, grain, or forage from the same land. The novice is 
warned, however, not to expect too much from asmall area. He must 
remember that as the bees commonly go 24 to 3 miles in all directions 
from the apiary, they thus range over an area of 12,000 to 18,000 acres, 
and if but 1 square foot in 100 produces a honey-yielding plant they ’ 
still have 120 to 180 acres of pasturage, and quite likely the equivalent 
of 30 to 40 acres may be in bloom at one time within range of the bees. 
A few acres more or less at sucha time will therefore not make a great 
deal of difference. 
But if coming between the principal crops—especially if the bees, as 
is often the case, would otherwise have no pasturage at all—the area 
provided for them may be of greater relative importance than the larger 
area of natural pasturage; for it frequently occurs that the smaller 
part only of the honey produced by the field over which the bees of 
an apiary range can be collected by them before it is washed out by _ 
rains, or the liquid portion is evaporated and the blossoms withered, 
while a smaller area may be more assiduously visited, and, the nectar 
being gathered as fast as secreted, a greater yield per acre may result. 
It is further of some importance to fill in sucha gap with something 
to keep the bees busy, instead of letting them spend their time trying to 
rob one another; and, what is probably even more important, the pas- 
turage thus furnished will keep up brood rearing and comb building and 
assist materially in preparing the colonies for the succeeding honey flow. 
69 
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