150 



AMERICAN BEE ICURNAL 



March 7, 1901. 



Management for Producing Extracted Honey. 



BV C. DAVENPORT. 



FOR the last seven or eight years I have run from 30 to 

 40 colonies for extracted honey, and intend this season 

 to increase the number to over 100, and I will describe 

 the plan or method on which they will be run, and tho this 

 method might not answer for some localities, it is the one 

 that will work here, I believe, and secure the most surplus 

 with the least work. 



While it is generally claimed and conceded that it re- 

 quires less work and skill to produce extracted than comb 

 honey, I have not found this to be altogether so. If I had 

 for the last few years I should have been producing ex- 

 tracted in a much larger way, and would do so now. The 

 first season I ran a number of colonies for our product in 

 the liquid form, it seemed to me that it required fully as 

 much, if not more, .work as well as skill to produce a first- 

 class article of extracted honey, as it did fancy comb honey. 

 But I have learned enough about this branch of our pursuit 

 since, so that I can now produce extracted with consider- 

 able less work than comb. 



Now the question may occur to some, why I started and 

 kept on producing extracted honey, if, with me, it required 

 as much work and skill as it did to produce comb honey. 

 There were a number of reasons for this, and two of the 

 principal ones I will explain. One was that there was a lo- 

 cal demand for extracted honey, at a better price accord- 

 ingly than there was for comb honey. I had, and have at 

 present, a still larger number of customers who prefer 

 honey in the extracted form, many of them preferring it 

 because it is cheaper — in fact, I have a good many custom- 

 ers who use a large amount of extracted honey every 

 year, and pay a good price for it, compared with the price 

 of comb honey, who would buy but very little if any comb 

 honey, because they could not — or at least believe they 

 could not — afford to. Others actually like it better in the 

 extracted form, and again some who are very fond of can- 

 died extracted honey care very little about comb honey. 

 Personally, I much prefer it in this form to comb honey. 



I used to extract a large amount of honey from the 

 brood-chambers late in the fall, then feed sugar syrup for 

 winter stores. At that time there was a good profit in do- 

 ing this, and the bees seemed to winter fully as well on 

 granulated sugar, as it was then made, as on natural stores, 

 and the honey thus obtained, tho it might be somewhat 

 mixt, was always thick and rich. But the price of our 

 product dropt so low that there was no longer profit in pro- 

 ducing extracted honey in this manner, tho I had a trade 

 for it already workt up — a trade that, as I have explained, 

 would not take comb honey in place of extracted. 



Another, and more important reason, was that about 

 that time (and I have seen no reason since to change my 

 opinion) I became convinced that more money could be 

 made from a large yard by running part of the colonies for 

 extracted honey, for here a range may be overstockt during 

 the forepart and latter part of the season, and still not have 

 enough bees to gather what nectar there is during clover 

 and basswood bloom. This is not the case every season, 

 but on an average it will hold true two seasons out of three, 

 and a colony that is being run for extracted honey can 

 gather considerably more nectar than one being run for 

 comb honey, for these reasons: A larger number of colo- 

 nies can be profitably kept in one yard if part of them are 

 run for extracted, than could be done if they were all run 

 for either comb or extracted honey. After carefully re- 

 peated experiments, some of which I have described in 

 these columns, I know, if I know anything about bees at 

 all, that more extracted honey can be secured here if the 

 queen is confined by zinc to the lower story of a hive not 

 larger than the 10-frame. The reason for this is, that with 

 a larger brood-nest an immense force of bees are reared out 

 of season, to be producers, but are. instead, consumers. I 

 know that this matter of rearing bees out of season has 

 been ridiculed by .some, but here it is a more important 

 matter — one that to ignore may mean the loss of a number 

 of thousand pounds of surplus honey with a large yard, 

 each season. I am aware that this is a strong assertion to 

 make, and that it is likely to be disputed by many able ones 

 in our ranks, but it should be borne in mind that I make 

 this claim only for my own locality, and for others where 

 the flows are similar to what we have here, relatively to the 

 season. 



It may be of interest to the newer readers of this 

 journal, for me very briefly to go over the experiments I 

 made to find out vvhetlier it was more profitable to allow 



more than one story for a brood-nest. These experiments 

 extended over a number of seasons, with slightly varying 

 results, owing to the varying conditions of the seasons, as 

 well as that of the bees. But without any exception they 

 all showed that a brood-nest here could be so large that it 

 would reduce the amount of surplus extracted honey that 

 could be obtained : besides, these large brood-nests, espe- 

 cially the unlimited ones, entailed much more work to get 

 what surplus there was, and to reduce or get the bees into 

 one story again for winter. 



My method was, each spring, to select 30 or 40 colonies 

 as nearly equal in strength as possible, and divide them into 

 lots of 10 each. The queen in one lot would be confined by 

 zinc to one story ; those in the second lot would be allowed 

 two stories for a brood-nest ; while the queens in the third 

 lot were allowed their will in 3 or 4 stories. Some lots 

 were in 10-frame hives and some in 8-frame, and, so far as 

 surplus honey was concerned, these two sizes of frame 

 made but little difference either way. But with the plan I 

 now practice, there is considerably more swarming where 

 the queens are allowed 10 frames than there is when they 

 have only 8 for a brood-nest. When the queens are al- 

 lowed two brood-chambers there will be here, in a good sea- 

 son, about half of them that will swarm, and some seasons 

 as large a percent of swarming will take place when the 

 queens are confined to 10 frames ; but with only 8 frames 

 for a brood-nest the swarming will not be over 10 percent — 

 it has been less with me the past two seasons. It is true 

 that both seasons were poor ones, still there was enough 

 honey gathered so that nearly 30 percent of the colonies 

 that had 10 and 16 frames for a brood-nest swarmed, or tried 

 to do so. Southern Minnesota. 



iTo be continued.) 



Longer Tongues and Larger Bees, Etc. 



BY ADRI.\N GKTAZ. 



BEES with longer tongues is the topic of the day. Meas- 

 ure the length of the tongues of the difi'erent colonies 

 of bees and select for breeding those with the longest- 

 tongued bees, if I can use that expression. 



Well, to begin with, I doubt about the exactness of the 

 measurements given by Mr. Ernest Root and a few other 

 experimenters. It seems to me that the difference between 

 the tongues measured is too great. There is hardly any 

 difference in the size of the bees and in the different organs 

 and parts of them ; and I don't see how the tongues could 

 make such striking exceptions, the measurements varying 

 between 13100 and 23-100 of an inch. The tongue of a 

 bee is very near as elastic as a man's tongue. How could 

 you measure exactly the length of a man's tongue which 

 can change its length, width and shape in all sorts of dif- 

 ferent ways ? And it is nearly so with bee-tongues. 



The method employed to measure them, is to chloroform 

 the "subjects," which makes them extend their tongues, 

 and measure them with calipers. But what proof have we 

 that they all extend their tongues to the same extent ? 

 None at all. 



Again, there is a considerable difference between the 

 length of tongues of the different bees of a colony (when 

 measured by the above-described process), and even admit- 

 ting that the measurements are correct we can measure 

 only a few bees — say 20 or even SO out of at least four or 

 five thousand bees of a colony. We may have measured 

 some of the shortest in one colony and some of the longest 

 in another, and failed to reach the proper average length, 

 or rather maximum length, for this would be the important 

 item to obtain. 



I do not say that this method of measurement should 

 be discarded, but I think necessary to have some indirect 

 way to check it, and ascertain to what depth the bees of 

 each colony can reach for the honey in the flowers. For 

 this I think an instrument as here represented would be the 

 best. It is simply a trough 4 or 5 inches long and not more 

 than '+-inch wide inside. The top is made of wire-cloth 

 thru which the bees can suck the syrup. The depth is from 

 '4 of an inch at one end to nothing at the other, forming an 

 incline. A scale is markt on the bottom dividing it by 

 transverse marks in 25 parts graduated from to 2.S, com- 

 mencing at the end where the depth is nothing. To use 

 the instrument, fill it with syrup or thin honey thru the 

 wire-cloth. Place it in an empty super on the top of the 

 l)rood-nest or the super that may be already there, being 

 sure that it is level. This can be easily done by placing 

 it so that the syrup comes even with the wire-cloth over the 



