1910 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



213 



longer time to settle; but, alas! it never did 

 settle so I could draw otY clear honey from 

 the bottom. My conclusion was that, if hot 

 wax and hot honey are well stirred togeth- 

 er, and if it is thick honey, the tiny globules 

 of wax will not rise before the honey cools; 

 and once it cools they will hardly rise at all; 

 and it may candy before it will settle. It 

 may be that the "veterans" know this; but 

 I did not, and I am now wondering if it does 

 not explain the specks which appeared like 

 grains of pollen on the tops of Mr. Byer's 

 honey- pails. 

 Mesilla Park, N. M. 



[We have seen considerable of Mr. Board- 

 man's honey; and, as we now recall, the 

 color, body, and quality were the equal of 

 any clover extracted we ever saw. Certain- 

 ly the color could not be in any way consid- 

 ered darkened in the least. 



There are a couple of conditions that may 

 be considered as possibly influencing the 

 color of your honey. First, you have a much 

 hotter climate; and the presumption is that 

 the heat inside of your sun extractors is 

 much higher than would be the heat inside 

 of Mr. Boardman's. But the most important 

 factor is that you liquefy honey that has been 

 actually candied solid in the sun extractor, 

 and the long-continued high temperature re- 

 quired to bring it to a liquid condition would 

 necessarily affect its color. Mr. Boardman 

 does not, as we understand it, allow his hon- 

 ey to candy, but treats it before it candies, as 

 explained in his article on page 768, Dec. 15, 

 last year. In doing this his honey is not sub- 

 jected to so long-continued a heat. We 

 would infer, then, that the sun's rays, when 

 applied no more than enough to arrest gran- 

 ulation in liquid honey, would not neces- 

 sarily affect its color, although there is a 

 bare possibility that alfalfa might be more 

 susceptible to the actinic rays than ordinary 

 clover or basswood. It. is true that Mr. 

 Boardman, in his earlier experiments, lique- 

 fied granulated honey; but his scheme seems 

 to be confined to liquid honey. 



It would seem to be very clear from your 

 experience that candied honey can not 6e as 

 satisfactorily liquefied by sun heat as by ar- 

 tificial. If we remember correctly, Mr. R. 

 C. Aikin, of Loveland, Colorado, experienced 

 somewhat the same difficulty in rendenng 

 up combs in his solars. He found that the 

 honey and the wax on the top were over- 

 heated, while the slumgum beneath was only 

 partially melted. To overcome this difficul- 

 ty he applied artificial heat on the under 

 side to the pan of the solar extractor, thus 

 getting heat from above and below. This 

 might eliminate a part of your trouble, al- 

 though it would be our opmion, if artificial 

 heat is to be used at all, that the increased 

 cost from using the sun's rays would more 

 than offset the slight advantage. 



If any other correspondent has had the 

 extensive experience of Mr. Metcalfe in liq- 

 uefying candied honey by sun heat, we have 

 never heard from him. Certainly his experi- 

 ment was conducted on a sufficiently large 



scale to justify the conclusion that solar heat 

 is not satisfactory for melting up granulated 

 honey. — Ed.] 



BEES AS ROBBERS OF FLOWERS, 



BY JOHN H. LOVELL. 



Dr. Miller's wide range of information and 

 genial humor render his page of notes most 

 valuable and entertaining. Apropos of his 

 remark on the absence of nectar from roses, 

 while I certainly do not wish to be censori- 

 ous, for we are all fallible enough, stiU I 

 think that popular writers on the honey-bee 

 should be more accurate in their statements. 

 For example, a well-known writer of chil- 

 dren's stories not long ago told in the Ladies' 

 Home Journal of a bee that gathered honey 

 and wax all through th e long summer months. 

 With a little effort the proper source of wax 

 might easily have been learned. 



Now as to the question, "Why do bees 

 seek to enter the young buds of roses? "^ 

 Perhaps a brief inquiry as to the behavior of 

 bees (bumble-bees as well as honey-bees) 

 toward flower-buds in general will be help- 

 ful. 



The fly-honeysuckle, or Lonicera ciliata, is 

 a graceful slender shrub which blooms in 

 our rocky northern woodlands during the 

 last weeks of May. The flower-stalk bears- 

 at its summit two pendulous, yellowish-green 

 flowers, which are half an inch in length and 

 tubular in form. The nectar is secreted and 

 lodged at the base of this tube, where it can 

 be readily reached by the long tongues of 

 bumblebees, by which chiefly this species 

 is pollinated, though it is also visited by but- 

 terflies. But the female, or queen of Bom- 

 bus consimilis, instead of waiting for the 

 flower to expand often bites a hole through 

 the bud. Sometimes the perforation is near 

 the apex of the bud, but usually it is near 

 the base of the tube, and in one instance I 

 found the corolla nearly circumcised, and 

 held by only a few threads. 



Bees also puncture at the apex (usually on 

 the under side) the buds of the common 

 skullcap, or Scutellaria galericulata, even 

 when they are quite immature. The flowers 

 are labiate, or lipped, and in two instances I 

 observed a narrow slit on the upper side of 

 the corolla tube, and in a third case the whole 

 upper portion of the tube was cut away, 

 leaving the lips suspended by a mere thread. 

 The buds and hollow tubular nectaries of 

 many other flowers are robbed by bees in 

 the same way. Let us go out into the field 

 and observe now bees puncture the nectaries 

 of two or three different kinds of flowers. 



The famihar "touch-me-not" (Impatiens 

 fulva) has its brown-spotted orange blossoms 

 shaped like a horn- of plenty with the spur 

 inflexed or bent inward beneath it. This 

 spur contains the nectar. The flower is 

 suspended horizontally with the anthers and 

 stigma lying upon its upper side, so that, 

 when a bee enters the dilated corolla- sac, its 

 back is dusted with pollen, which it carries 

 away to another flower. While the spurs 



