98 EIGHTEENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE 



of machinery, fixing up old houses, irregular hours and all the incon- 

 venience which goes with the old system. 



At the final taking off all supers and excluders are left at home 

 until they can be scraped and repaired so as to be in shipshape for 

 next season. The honey after standing several days- to clarify by 

 gravity has all particles of wax and foam from extracting removed and 

 is tinned up in selling packages. 



It will be seen that the method described above reduces building 

 space at outapiaries but increases that required at home. This trans- 

 fers the building expense from rented sites to the home place where 

 the bee-keeper probably owns the land. The central building will 

 need to be much larger than the usual run of honeyhouses. Ours is 

 24 feet by 40 feet with an upper story and attic, and if we were building 

 again the size would be doubled at least. Above all, have plenty of 

 windows for light and air. Bee-keepers might well take a lesson from 

 modern factory construction in that respect. The plan of the building 

 is quite simple and is proving very satisfactory. The ground floor has 

 three rooms, one eleven feet wide running across one end for the truck, 

 and two each about 11 feet wide and 29 feet long running lengthwise 

 of the building. Of these two, the one next the apiary is used for 

 extracting and the other for honey-storage. The pipe from the honey- 

 pump passes through the partition and is arranged for distributing 

 the honey to the various store tanks. 



Upstairs is an office, carpenter shop and store room. The latter 

 has a trapdoor over the garage for handling supplies to and from the 

 truck which stands underneath. Last, but not least, is a small room 

 partitioned off in a sunny corner for a showerbath. This niay cause 

 some bee-keepers to exclaim at "frills," but especially in the hot 

 weather we consider it may add fifteen or twenty per cent to a man's 

 efficiency to make it handy for him to get a cool shower in the middle 

 of the day. 



After building up the producing end of the business we must not 

 neglect the profitable sale of the honey. This is a point in which many 

 bee-keepers are deficient. They like to work with the bees, and if 

 they do not they are not successful bee-keepers; they enjoy preparing 

 the honey for market; but when it comes to making a good sale -they 

 fall down. It is not surprising, for in scarcely any other producing 

 line outside of general farming is the producer expected to be salesman 

 as well. It is an entirely different field of activity, and when we see 

 the supers piling up on the hives with a big crop we begin to tremble 

 for fear everyone else is piling up supers in the same way, and we look 

 forward to a time when we will have to sacrifice the price if we sell at 

 all. As a class bee-keepers are the biggest optimists on production 

 and the biggest pessimists on marketing I know. One reason is an 

 idea which farmers hold with peculiar reference to honey. It is that 

 the price of honey should not fluctuate with market conditions. Be- 

 cause they sold their honey at ten cents per pound last year they think 

 it would be some sort of breach of etiquette to ask their neighbors to 

 pay twelve cents this year. This must be because the bees are not 

 taken at all seriously and any profit from them is looked upon as just 

 that much "velvet" as it were. That is unfortunately a very pre- 



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