140 



THE BEE-KEEPERS- REVIEW 



Here it is different. When A. I. Root be- 

 gan the hive making business, a single 

 story eight, or, at most, ten L frames, 

 was considered sufficient. Later, it de- 

 veloped that it was not so; but the bee- 

 keepers had already their hives made of 



that size, the manufacturers objected 

 strongly to the introduction of a third pat- 

 tern, so all the efforts made have been in 

 view of using two-story hives. But it is 

 only a makeshift, and a poor one at that. 

 Knoxville, Tenn., Jan. 1, 1911. 



»l 



[^ 



42,000 Pounds of Honey, Mostly Comb, from Alsike 

 Clover and Good Management. 



J. E. CRANE. 



CRIEND Hutch- 



-T' inson: I have 



been much inter- 

 ested in the late 



numbers of the 



Review, butnoth- 



ing has interested 



so much as to 



learn of your im- 



p roved health, 



and I hope you 



may fully recover 

 your strength and vigor of former years. 

 We have had an exceedingly busy season, 

 with a crop of some 37,000 pounds of 

 honey; about two-thirds of it comb honey, 

 besides buying a good many thousand 

 pounds more, and packing much of it for 

 market. 



Our stock of bees was not large this 

 yeir— less than 600 colonies. Four years 

 ago with about 650 colonies in the spring, 

 if I remember rightly, we had not far from 

 42,000 pounds, about three-fourths comb 

 honey. We now have a stock of nearly 

 800 colonies, and know of no reason why 

 our crop the coming season should not be 

 much larger than that of four years ago, 

 which was the largest crop we have ever 

 harvested. 



Formerly one of our principal sources 

 of honey was basswood, but some twelve 

 years ago, we had an epidemic of forest 

 worms that for two years in succession 

 destroyed the leaves of basswood and 

 other trees, since which the basswood has 



seemed to give very little honey; and, 

 during the last five or six years the lum- 

 bermen have pretty nearly finished the 

 basswood. Strange to say. however, our 

 crops of honey have been quite as large 

 as before. 



GREAT YIELDS FROM ALSIKE CLOVER. 



I presume this comes in part from bet- 

 ter methods of management, and in part 

 from the increased acreage of alsike clo- 

 ver, I began sowing alsike seed in 1867, 

 paying SI. 20 per pound for it, which was, 

 I presume, the first sown in this state. 

 Last spring I suppose some 5,000 pounds 

 of alsike clover seed were sold by the 

 seed dealers of our village, to say noth- 

 ing of the amount sold by dealers in sur- 

 rounding towns, nor of the immense quan- 

 tity of seed that was scattered while 

 gathering the hay crop the past summer. 

 Last spring was wet and cool, just right 

 for clover, and alsike clover came into 

 bloom as I have never seen it before, 

 even in old meadows that have not been 

 plowed for many years. It seemed as 

 though some good angel had hovered over 

 the earth and sowed the seed everywhere, 

 even on farms where the owners were 

 quite too penurious to buy the seed. Two 

 or three hundred acres of this kind of 

 clover in range of each yard of bees gives 

 one a very comfortable feeling, and I find 

 we are in danger of forgetting to pray, 

 "Give us this day our daily bread." We 

 have had but comparatively little white 



