1()2 EIGHTEENTH ANNUAL EEPORT OF THE 



Mr. Wheeler. — I don't see, as long as you put the honey back 

 and let the bee have it again, why the bees are not the best fellows to 

 do the second extracting. You don't lose anything, the bees get the 

 honey, and j'ou save yourself work. 



A Member. — Why not let them do all of the extracting? 



Mr. MacNeill. — Yes, that is the way some of us do. 



The President. — I see we have with us this afternoon Mr. 

 Wesley Foster. We will be very glad to have a few words from him 

 if he will talk to us. 



Mr. Foster. — Mr. Chairman, I don't know what I will talk 

 about. I think of all the talks I heard this afternoon I enjoyed Mr. 

 Kindig's about as well as anything. It only made me glad I lived in 

 Colorado, where we produce pretty good crops of honey at times. 



I have had a few ideas along this re-extracting of combs. Of course 

 in my own apiary I use a power extractor, eight-frame power machines, 

 and run them with a gasoline engine, use portable outfits that I can 

 take from bee-yard to bee-yard and extract one or two days, according 

 to the length of time required. We let the machine run on eight combs 

 while we are uncapping eight more, and then we are ready for extract- 

 ing again, so I doubt whether it would pay us to practice what Mr. 

 Baldwin suggested, although where one is using a hand machine on a 

 small bunch of bees it might produce a little more honey. I would not 

 want to argue with him on that point. 



There is one thing that I do want to say, though, about conventions 

 of this kind. It is not the actual bee information that we get that 

 amounts to anything, it is the pep we get here and the enthusiasm 

 to go home to produce better crops of honey ourselves, and I believe 

 that — ^well, I know there are probably scores of better bee-keepers in 

 this room than I am, but I let the amateurs and those who only keep 

 bees for the pleasure there is in it do the experimenting, and then they 

 tell me about it and I go home and put it into practice and get a bigger 

 crop of honey. 



I feel a good deal that way about Dr. PhiUips' wintering theories. 

 I have put quite a little money into winter packing, and my helpers 

 laugh at it a good deal. I am going to keep trying it out. They made 

 fun of it all summer, and only expected one-half as much as they got 

 from those which had wintered with no protection whatever. I am not 

 satisfied that that is the true result. I still want to look a little further 

 into it. With us the bees that we had packed were too comfortable, 

 they did not begin breeding and build up as soon as those did that were 

 wintered on the summer stand, and they did not produce as big crops, 

 they did not get as strong, ready for the early flow. I don't know just 

 why. ' I have got to work on that a little more, but that is the fact. 

 With us all the bees that were packed seemed to be — well, I would not 

 exactly say that it was damp, but it appeared that way. The frames 

 and the combs had the appearance of being damp, although I could 

 not find any actual moisture present. That is, though, we have an 

 extremely dry climate and the interior of most of our hives is absolutely 

 dry, so that I don't know whether that has anything to do with it or not. 

 But I do know that I did not get any results so far from packing. 



