THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW 



41 



Mr. Hutchinscn, if ycu see fit you may 

 use the above. If you have any sug- 

 gestions as to the manner of carrying out 

 my tests in order that the merits of this 

 plan may be fairly and convincingly 

 brought before the public, I would thank 

 you for them. 



Atascosa, Tex., Nov. 29, 1909. 



[I have two reasons for making room 

 for matter regarding the Avant system 

 of harvesting honey by sucking it out of 

 the combs: One reason is that I wish to 

 be perfectly fair, and give every man and 

 invention a show, no matter how visionary 

 the matter; and the other is that some 

 of our most important inventions and 

 discoveries were once considered vision- 

 ary — yes worse than visionary, actually 

 detrimental. 



I admire Mr. Avant. In a way he has 

 made a success of what seems like an 

 impossibility — that of removing the honey 

 from a hive without so much as opening 

 the hive. While it seems as though this 

 inventor had taken up the problem at the 

 wrong end, was working in the wrong 

 direction, no one can say positively that 

 nothing will come from it. Friend Avant 

 and myself have had quite a little cor- 

 respondence over the matter, and here is 

 the way he came at me one time: "You 

 have had quite a lot of experience with 

 bees, with machinery, with the world, 

 and a lot of other problems, now tell me 

 where you think my system will fail." 

 1 will confess that it was something of a 

 poser. 1 suppose that most of my readers 

 know something of the principle upon 

 which our Texan friend is working, but, 

 some of them m.ay not, so I'll briefly 

 explain that it is something like splitting 

 a comb right down through the middle, 

 leaving one-half of the midrib on one 

 side, and the other half on the other side, 

 with a small space between them. That 

 is not the way that Mr. Avant goes at it, 

 however; his midribs are made of thin 

 metal, having perforations five-to-the- 

 inch, and covered with wax, like founda- 

 tion; and the bees draw out this wax 

 and make cells on each side. Through 



openings in the side of the hive he makes 

 connections with the spaces in the centers 

 of the combs, and by means of a suction 

 pump run by a gasoline engine he se- 

 cures sufficient vacuum in the spaces in 

 the combs to suck the honey back into 

 these spaces, and even clear out of the 

 spaces and into some kind of receptacle 

 outside of the hives. The suction is even 

 strong enough to cave in the cappings, 

 if not to thick and heavy. His plan, at 

 present, however, is to extract before 

 there has been very much capping of the 

 honey, sterilize the honey, keep it from 

 the air, and, finally, when there is leisure, 

 after the flow is over, feed it back to the 

 bees, producing either comb or extracted 

 honey. 



It looks like a round-about-way — like 

 a whole lot of machinery. It seems so 

 much simpler to let the bees store, ripen 

 and cap the honey right in the combs in 

 the first place, either for comb or ex- 

 tracted honey. I know that the claim is 

 made that much more honey is secured 

 by frequent extracting, more than would 

 be secured by the giving of empty combs 

 and allowing the already filled combs to 

 remain on the hive, but I believe that this 

 question is still unsettled. It is claimed 

 that frequent extracting will largely pre- 

 vent swarming. It will. So will the 

 giving of empty combs, without the 

 extracting. The keeping of green nectar 

 without its souring or deteriorating in 

 any manner seems like a difficult thing to 

 do, but I suppose that even this difficulty 

 may be overcome. That the nectar may 

 be fed back and made into comb honey I 

 have not a particle of doubt. I have had 

 enough experience along this line to make 

 me quite hopeful on this point. 



In considering this subject, as well as 

 others, we must not forget that there is 

 such a thing as habit of thought. This 

 system is really revolutionary. It goes at 

 the problem in an entirely new and novel 

 manner — really contrary to our habit of 

 considering the harvesting of honey; and 

 it is sometimes hard to give up old ideas 

 and accept new. — Editor] 



