THE.BEEKEEPERS' REVIEW 



183 



such other injuries as to confine her to 

 her bed for nine days. It is a wonder 

 that our good friends escaped with their 

 lives; and all because it was the night 

 before city election on the liquor question, 

 and, whiskey being free at the bars, this 

 neighbor was so crazy after "more," that 

 he didn't use his eyes in driving. 



Keep the Stray Bees in the Honey House. 



With almost any system of manage- 

 ment a few bees will be carried into the 

 honey house when extracting honey, and, 

 with some methods, a good many will be 

 carried in, and the most of us try to get 

 these bees out again just as soon as we 

 can; in fact, our honey houses are rigged 

 up with bee escapes at the windows to 

 allow the bees to pass out as fast as 

 brought in. If the extracting is done 

 during a honey flow, this practice is not 

 objectionable, but during a dearth of 

 honey, the turning loose of these bees 

 loaded with honey raises the very 

 Dickens, as Mr. Townsend explains in 

 his article this month. As he well-says, 

 so long as no bee carries home a load of 

 honey all is quiet, but the coming home 

 of a loaded bee at a time when bees will 

 rob, no matter whether that load was 

 stolen, or whether it was acquired during 

 the excitement of carrying a super to the 

 honey house, will start out hundreds of 

 robbers in hot haste. Keep these loaded 

 bees in the honey house, let them cluster 

 and cling to the window casing until 

 the work is done at that yard then give 

 them to weak colonies. These bees are 

 loaded with honey and could hang there 

 for days without starving. Some of 

 them may return to their original home, 

 but no great harm will be done, as the 

 work of opening hives is over. 



"Keeping More Bees" — Let's be Fair. 



For several years I have been urging 

 bee keepers to keep more bees, to make 

 a specialty of the business, yet many of 

 them seem to resent the advice. If a 

 man makes a failure of bee keeping, or 



even has a loss, he writes to me, and 

 then at the end of this letter he says, in a 

 sarcastic way, "Keep more bees." One 

 good friend, in renewing his subscription 

 recently, said: "No profit last year. 

 Honey dew. $4.25 from 23 colonies. 

 Great! Keep more bees." By some 

 strange coincidence, the same mail 

 brought a letter from a good friend over 

 in Ontario, and the postscript to his 

 letter read as follows: "Perhaps it may 

 interest you to know that I am now 

 running 450 colonies, and that my crop 

 last year was 49,000 pounds." 



Now it is just as fair to judge bee 

 keeping by one of these letters as it is 

 by the other. There is no business that 

 is free from losses and failures, to decry 

 bee keeping as a specialty because of 

 this, is not logical. Drouths, tornadoes, 

 or floods ruin the farmer's crops; late 

 frosts destroy the blossoms of the fruit 

 specialist; and all of these things are 

 taken as a matter of course, but let 

 there'be severe winter losses of bees, or 

 a short crop of honey, and everybody is 

 ready to say that bee keeping is too 

 risky to be depended upon for a living. The 

 real sensible way to do is to keep enough 

 bees so that when you do have a big 

 crop you will get enough honey to keep 

 you over two or three poor years. It is 

 rather wandering from the point, but, by 

 having apiaries scattered in diff^erent 

 parts of the country, a total failure is 

 almost impossible. 



What are the Advantages of the Power 

 Honey Extractor? 



In Northern Michigan we have, or did 

 have, three, 4-frame, Root, Automatic 

 honey extractors. In the past, our idea 

 has been to have a complete outfit at 

 each yard. As we use a two-horse team 

 in going to the out-apiaries, we have 

 been considering the plan of having an 

 8-frame extractor driven by a gasoline 

 engine. Where only one or two supers 

 to the hive are employed, and the honey 

 extracted before the harvest is ended, to 



