AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



As the colony of Italians you are to g^et will be without 

 hive, it will no doubt be without brood. So it will be a },'Ood 

 plan to have the transferring- done before you receive tlie 

 Italian bees, and then )'OU can g^ive the Italians the larg^er 

 share of the brood in the old colony. That will make at 

 first a mixt lot of workers in the colony with the Italian 

 <iueen, but that will be no harm. A week later any queen 

 reared from brood taken from the Italian queen will be of 

 the right stock. Having now the two colonies to draw from, 

 you can form new colonies by taking a frame of brood and 

 bees from each when you want to start a new colony. 



By keeping the Italian colony strong, you will be sure 

 to have drones therefrom. When you give brood from the 

 old colony to the Italian, see that you take combs that have 

 some drone-comb in them, but if any drone-comb is in them 

 at the time destroy it by shaving off the heads of the sealed 

 brood and sprinkling fine salt on the unsealed. 



Transferring Bees. 



1. Which would be the best month or time to transfer 

 bees from common, rough redwood boxes to regular hives ? 



2. Is it not a rare thing for a few bees (I could not see 

 more than 10 bees), at about 4 p.m., and about half a mile 

 from the seashore, to commence building a comb on the 

 edge of a common cypress hedge, (around an apple orchard 

 four years old), the branch being only about two or three 

 feet from the ground? I could see no other bees but the 

 few workers I mentioned. I was looking at them about ten 

 minutes. 



3. I would like to know if it is possible to hive the 

 above bees, and also, how and when to do it. Also, suppose 

 they were hived, would you put the hive on the ground in 

 the same place or not? California. 



Answers. — 1. Probably 21 days after casting a swarm. 

 If you prefer it earlier, take the time when the combs are as 

 light as possible and bees working at the same time. In 

 the North this comes at the time of apple-bloom. 



2. Decidedly a rare thing for so small a number as 10 

 bees to be engaged in comb-building anywhere. Are you 

 sure they were not carrying away was that had been left 

 there by a swarm that had been clustering there ? Some- 

 times it happens that a swarm starts to build comb on a 

 limb, then leaves, and a few stray bees get left. 



3. It is doubtful if you could hive 10 bees and get them 

 to stay, and they wouldn't be of any value should you suc- 

 ceed. 



i ^ The Afterthought. ^ \ 



QZI] : The "Old Reliable" seen thru New and Unreliable Glasses. 

 By E. E. HASTY, Richards. Ohio. 



FRENCH ANTI-PROGRKSS — BEES .\ND PLANTS. 



I think most of us were interested in reading how, for 

 the French-speaking portion of the world, the anti-progress 

 monster intrencht in the columns of the only French bee- 

 journal was bought and conquered by Messrs. Dadant and 

 Bertrand. . We are glad Mr. Bertrand has the beautiful 

 home we read of, looking out upon its beautiful scene. 

 Rather in the nature of news that Mt. Blanc is of three diff- 

 erent colors at three different times of the daj*. 



Yes, now editor Bertrand calls our attention to it, it is 

 getting apparent that plants (for their own look-out-for- 

 number-one profit) have three wavs of securing the attend- 

 ance of bees — nectar, pollen, and more or less mysterious 

 dainties, very small in bulk, and of which the bee never 

 gets a load to carry home. (This doesn't prove that the bee 

 never carries home a«_)' of these minute secretions.) Mr. 

 Bertrand's experiment of marking a bee at work on his 

 "Dar-room plant," and watching it for five hours consecu- 

 tively, and noting that the little dupe had nothing to show 

 for its work at the end of the time — that experiment de- 

 serves a g-reat deal more attention than it has received 

 hitherto. All of us who pay any scientific attention to for- 

 age plants need to be on the lookout. I feel pretty sure 

 that poppies, altho they may furnish some of both pollen 

 and nectar, furnish something else also, and that it is this 



"something else" that gets the bees so excited. And I won- 

 der a little if the angelica (devil's club) is not another case 

 of the same thing. I had never heard before that the Chap- 

 man honey-plant was of this character. It seems Mr. Ber- 

 trand had discovered that before the plant had its boom in 

 this countr3\ I fear we shall find that all plants wliich never 

 fail to attract bees are of this bad kidney, and that all 

 plants furnishing large amounts of nectar have occasional 

 times of barrenness when bees ignore them. Don't let any 

 one tell the man who wastes his time hovering around our 

 horrible Eryngiura giganteum that that model of industry, 

 the bee, does the same thing. 



Do we understand that it was an American plant that 

 scored in Mr. Bertrand's garden the record of rapid growth 

 — an inch an hour? Sounds that way. And if any people 

 have been saying that Mr. Dadant writes nice travel letters 

 with the bees left out, they must admit that he has re- 

 deemed himself this time. Page 761, 



CAGING AND MAILING OUEEN-BEES. 



Forty bees in a very big cage, with both cold-weather 

 room and hot-weather rooms — the way Doolittle sends 

 queens to the Boers. If he would only contrive some way 

 to deprive them of one queen all the world (save one nation) 

 would crown him " king of men." Sixty-five degrees of 

 temperature for your caged queens, whenever you can boss 

 the thermometer. Most of us would have jumpt conclusions 

 for a much higher temperature, and Mr. Doolittle deserves 

 thanks for a valuable item. Also those of us who have no 

 experience in caging queens during harvest are glad to be 

 assured that the bees can be depended upon to feed them. 

 Page 742. 



NECTAR AND CANE-SUGAR. 



It seems to me that Editor Cowan, on page 758, makes 

 a little slip where he says that the sweet of nectar is 

 "almost entirely" cane-sugar. Unless my memory is 

 greatly astray, we had, not many years ago, the exact 

 determination of the different kinds of sugars in several 

 samples of nectar made by scientific hands— samples gath- 

 ered artificially. One or more of the samples showed more 

 than half cane-sugar, but most of them less than half- 

 composition varying greatly according to the species of 

 plant the nectar came from, 



.\CID TO PREVENT GRANULATION, 



I should have used ever so much excess of acid if I had 

 been askt to make bee-feed with vinegar to prevent granu- 

 lati'in. If there is another brother as green as I let him 

 make a note. Tablespoonful will do for 10 pounds of sugar, 

 if the vinegar is sharp. Page 771. 



INTERNECINE WAR ABOUT I'URE FOOD. 



Mr. Abbott's speech is quite a refreshing change from 

 the formal tone of the ordinary convention paper. And so 

 there's internecine war between friend and friend among 

 the friends of pure-food legislation. Sad. And all because 

 the butter-folks are set in the resolution to subject imita- 

 tion butter to additional disabilities, beyond being said un- 

 der its own name— disabilities more or less inquisitorial. 

 Stated in that way, it sounds as if the Brosius folks are al- 

 together right and the others altogether wrong. But no in- 

 justice will be done by stating the other side. I suppose 

 the other chaps will say that people are fooled with bogus 

 butter more frequently than in almost any other way— and 

 more to their disgust; that the person who eats butter is of- 

 tener than otherwise not the person who buys it; that pres- 

 ent methods inform the buyer what he buys, but not the 

 eater what he eats; and that therefore it is right to protect 

 the eater by forbidding the imitation to be colored like the 

 genuine. That sounds reasonable, too— but it murders an 

 honest infant industry (honesty infantile altho the industry 

 is not) seeing that no one will eat as a relish a new stuff 

 that looks queer. But the boy that must have absolutely all 

 the candy he calls for, else destroy all the candy designed 

 for the crowd — I fear the most kindly friend of naughty 

 boys would find it hard to say anything- mitigatory for him. 

 Page 773— S. 



The Chicago Convention Picture is a fine one. It is 

 nearly SxlO inches in size, mounted on heavy card ird 

 10x12 inches. It is, we believe, the largest group of bee- 

 keepers ever taken in one picture. It is sent, postpaid, for 

 75 cents; or we can send the American Bee Journal one 

 year and the picture — both for SI. 60. It would be a nice 

 picture to frame. We have not counted them, but think 

 there are nearly 200 bee-keepers shown. 



