March, 1913. 



American ^Qa Journal 



appeal to the sympathyof every one'of 

 the subscribers, hence we publish them 

 just as received from Dr. Miller in a 

 private letter. 



Mrs. Wilson gave the example of a 

 quiet ending because of a frugal, peace- 

 ful life. A good example for us all. 



Margaret Pringle vvfas born in Per- 

 wickshire, Scotland, Feb. 15, 1819. 

 With her father's family she came to 

 America in girlhood, and to Kentucky 

 in June, 1838. In the fall of 1841, the 

 family moved to Jo Daviess Co., 111., 

 where, July l!9, 1842, she was married 

 to John Wilson, who preceded her to 

 the better land by nearly 24 years. In 

 1844, she settled with her husband on 

 the Wilson farm north of Marengo, 

 where she lived until 1898. The last 14 

 years of her life were spent at the 

 home of her eldest daughter, Mrs. C. C. 

 Miller. 



Mrs. Wilson was the mother of eight 

 children, five of whom are now living. 

 Mrs. Sidney J. Miller, Mary E. Wilson, 

 Emma M. Wilson, and John F. Wilson, 

 of Marengo; and ■Sirs. Annie Stull, of 

 Los Angeles, Calif. She also reared 

 one step-daughter, Eiiza Wilson, who 

 became the wife of Rev. J. N. Hutchin- 

 son. Her living grandchildren number 

 twelve, with one ffreat grandchild. 



Eft'ect.s of Feeding Sugar 



When a year of failure comes and 

 the bee-keeper finds the brood-cham- 

 bers of his colonies empty of stores in 

 the fall, with no honey on hand to feed 

 them, it is no small convenience, to put 

 it mildly, that he may resort to sugar 

 as a safe substitute for winter stores 

 In some localities the bees have filled 

 their brood-chamber with a sort of 

 honey-dew that is practically poison 

 for winter stores, and then what a 

 blessing it is that the unwholesome 

 stores may be extracted and sugar 

 syrup supplied in their place! The 

 American bee-keeper may congratulate 

 himself upon the low price at which 

 he can obtain the best granulated 

 sugar. Pages upon pages in European 

 bee journals are occupied with discus- 

 sions as to getting sugar duty free for 

 the purpose of feeding bees, either 

 having a law allowing each bee-keeper 

 to receive free of duty so many pounds 

 of sugar for each colony, or else hav- 

 ing denatured sugar at a low price. 

 The American bee-keeper has no 

 worry over anything of this kind so 

 long as he can get all the sugar he 

 wants at not far from .5 cents a pound. 



But the indiscriminate feeding of 

 sugar is not without its dangers. The 

 man who feeds sugar at a time when it 

 will be stored in the surplus compart- 

 ment is doing a dishonest thing, that 

 is especially reprehensible because of 

 the general discredit it brings upon all 

 hone^, t^oi is the feeding at other 



times always without danger. It has 

 been found that when the brood-cham- 

 ber has been unusually well stored 

 with dark honey in the fall, and a good 

 portion of it left over at the time of 

 the opening of the white honey har- 

 vest, some of the dark honey would be 

 found in the supers, having been car- 

 ried there to make room for the queen 

 in the lower story. Of course, there 

 would be the same danger that sugar 

 syrup would be carried up under the 

 same circumstances. 



Replacing Honey with Sugar. — But 

 sugar is not always fed as a matter of 

 necessity. When honey can be sold at 

 10 cents a pound and sugar can be 

 bought for half that price, it seems an 

 attractive proposition to empty the 

 honey out of the brood-chamber and 

 replace it with sugar syrup. Suppose 

 we figure a little. Here is a colony in 

 the fall with its store of honey all 

 ready for winter. Let us extract from 

 it 30 pounds of honey and feed back in 

 its place 30 pounds of sugar syrup, 5 

 pounds of sugar to 2 pounds of water. 

 In 3ii pounds of such syrup there will 

 be 21.4 pounds of sugar. We will now 

 have : 



30 lbs. of honey at 10c $3.00 



21.4 lbs. of sugar at 5c 1.07 



Profit $1.93 



If we have an apiary of 100 colonies, 

 that would give us $193 pay for the ex- 

 tracting and feeding, which might all 

 be done in a week. Even if it would 

 take 2 weeks, or 12 days, we would have 

 $16 a day for our trouble. Looks good, 



doesn't it ? 

 But there are things that will cause 



some shading down of these figures. 

 Time and again it has been shown that 

 when 30 pounds of syrup are fed it 

 means an addition of considerably less 

 than 30 pounds to the stores of the 

 colony. Just why or how this loss oc- 

 curs does not now concern us ; the 

 fact of such loss does concern us, and 

 that fact is well established. Lately, in 

 a German bee journal, a bee-keeper of 

 30 years' experience reported that dur- 

 ing that time he had had 100 colonies 

 or more nearly all the time, and had 

 fed thousands of pounds of sugar for 

 wintering. The bees wintered well, 

 but he had not failed to notice that a 

 colony heavy with such stores the first 

 of October would be very greatly re- 

 duced in weight two months later, 

 while colonies which had not been 

 thus fed, but had gathered their own 

 stores of honey, showed no apprecia- 

 ble diminution of weight at the same 



time. 



An item in the loss is the probable 

 transformation of some of the syrup 

 into wax. Whenever we feed bees 



plentifully and rapidly, they show a 

 tendency to produce wax, and often 

 whiten their combs with new wax, 

 even though there is but little need of 

 it. There are those who claim that 

 wa.x costs only two pounds of syrup or 

 honey for each pound of wax, but there 

 are also records of this sort of feeding 

 requiring some 20 pounds of honey for 

 each pound of wax. Putting it be- 

 tween the two, for an average, the wax 

 produced under such circumstances is 

 certainly not a profitable investment. 



Effect on the Bees. — There is an- 

 other phase of the subject vastly more 

 important, that may have resulted in. 

 heavy loss which the average bee- 

 keeper has attributed to anything else 

 rather than the feeding of sugar. 

 When sugar is fed, the cane sugar 

 must be changed to inverted sugar, 

 and that change costs something to 

 the bee, and a loss to the bee is a loss 

 to the bee-keeper. Another item, how- 

 ever, greatly overshadows this. In a 

 late number of Schweizerische Bienen- 

 zeitung. Dr. U. Kramer has especially 

 emphasized it. Analysis showed that 

 in the winter stores of sugar syrup, 

 albumen was contained to the amount 

 of 28 hundredths of one percent in the 

 unsealed cells and 36 hundredths of 

 one percent in the sealed cells, or much 

 the same as in pure honey. Xow, 

 where did this albumen come from ? 

 Not from the sugar, but from the body 

 of the bee itself. This, of course, causes 

 wear and tear to the bee, and unless 

 this nitrogenous material is promptly 

 supplied to the bee, the wear and tear 

 becomes very serious indeed. Dr. 

 Kramer considers it clearly shown 

 that the bees will be weakened thus by 

 the feeding of sugar if large quantities 

 be fed too rapidly, or if the feeding be 

 done during continuously bad weather 

 when the bees cannot secure pollen, or 

 so late in the season that pollen is no 

 longer to be had. He points out that 

 this explains why it is that bees are so 

 eager for pollen when sugar is fed, and 

 why it is that a fine store of pollen will 

 disappear without any starting oil 

 brood-rearing, and also why in springj 

 a colony becomes rapidly decimated] 

 with continuous feeding of sugar wittil 

 no pollen available to replace the nitro-^ 

 genous material. 



Taking all these things into account 

 it will be seen that the bee-keeper whoj 

 figured on a profit of $1.93 may in 

 some cases sustain a loss to tha^ 

 amount through the replacing of honey 

 with syrup of sugar, as a result of thel 

 reduced forces that will be ready toj 

 enter upon the expected harvest. 



There are some, and they are wise,! 



