612 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



Oct. 1 



Stray Straws 



By Dr. C. C. Miller, Marengo, 111. 



White clover quit in July, and in Sep- 

 tember there is a second crop — don't know 

 whether bees get much from it. 



L. H. LiNDEMUTH, page 597, my mother 

 kept section honey in an attic, and the heat 

 of the summer, or perhaps only fall, so ripen- 

 ed it that it kept perfectly through the win- 

 ter without granulation or cracking of the 

 comb. 



A. I. Root, p. 578, you were not careless 

 at all in your reading in the old version 

 about .Jesus eating honey. The second def- 

 inition of "honeycomb" in the Standard is 

 the comb and its contents; and in the Bi- 

 ble, honey-comb always means comb honey. 

 Several times the sweetness of honey-comb 

 is mentioned, and you know the empty 

 comb is not sweet. 



Some time ago Editor Hutchinson said 

 he never scraped burr-combs off top-bars, 

 and asked if any thing was gained by it. I 

 don't knov/ about extracting; but I know 

 that, if they are left year after year, combs 

 will finally be built between top-bars and 

 sections, and, what's worse, honey will be 

 there. I don't want the bottoms of sections 

 mussed up in that way. [Same experience 

 here. — Ed.] 



Have you laid up a store of sealed combs 

 of honey for the bees next spring? It pays 

 to do so. About two for each colony if you 

 have eight-frame hives. Not so many, pos- 

 sibly, for larger hives. [We have for years 

 made it a practice to lay aside nice sealed 

 combs. These we hold in reserve, and give 

 to colonies toward spring as they may need 

 them. It is usually not practicable to feed 

 liquid syrup in midwinter, nor even in cool 

 weather in the spring. — EId.] 



A bee-line is popularly supposed to be 

 the course always taken by a bee. Accord- 

 ing to the French investigator, Felix Plateau, 

 as quoted in August Deutsche BzchL, this 

 is by no means always true. If a bee finds 

 a good foraging spot, no matter through 

 how circuitous a route, it will conti .ue to 

 visit it, but always by the same circuitous 

 route that it took on its first visit. [You 

 are quite right. A bee-line is generally sup- 

 posed to be a straight line. Very often bees 

 strike out in a zigzag course Whether this 

 is due to air currents or what, we do not 

 know. — Ed.] 



This question is handed me: " Is it best 

 to allow the first honey to fill the brood- 

 chamber? " No; better leave some room 

 for brood. But I suppose the idea is: "Is it 

 best to let the bees store what they will of 

 the first honey for winter stores?" Gener- 

 ally such honey is of best quality for win- 

 tering, and it will be a safe thing to leave it 

 in the brood-chamber. But a good queen 



will have so much brood that in an eight- 

 frame hive not half enough of the first hon- 

 ey can be left for winter, and the rest of the 

 winter stores must be filled in later in the 

 season. 



Here's the situation: At the beginning of 

 the harvest, more or less empty combs are 

 in the hive, which the bees fill before filling 

 the supers. Probably nothing is better for 

 the bees than to leave them to their own 

 devices. But for the bee-keeper, if he has a 

 fall flow that is good for wintering, it is bet- 

 ter to replace these enqity combs in the 

 spring with sealed combs of the dark honey 

 he has saved from the previous year. It 

 gives him just so much more light honey 

 as surplus. 



"A TABLESPOONFUL of glycerin to one 

 gallon of honey will prevent it from granu- 

 lating!" says the Canadian Bee Journal, 

 page 229. [The pure-food inspectors in this 

 State have determined that the use of glycer- 

 in in honey would be a violation of the i^ure- 

 food law. Not long ago a dealer in Cleve- 

 land, Ohio, paid a fine for putting glycerin 

 into his extracted honey. In defense he 

 said he did not use it to cheapen the honey, 

 because the article is far more expensive; 

 but he did it to prevent granulation. The 

 pure-food commissioner held that any for- 

 eign substance put into honey for any pur- 

 pose whatever would be considered by his de- 

 partment as an adulterant, and he would 

 proceed to apply the law to all persons who 

 used it. It would be unwise to use it in any 

 State. Incidentally we may say that we 

 doubt very much whether glycerin will pre- 

 vent granulation. Some tests we made in 

 an experimental way showed that it had lit- 

 tle or no effect. — E^d.] 



S. King Clover, I'm with you about the 

 width of hives, p. 585. I never could under- 

 stand why a dummy was not as necessary 

 in a ten-frame as in an eight-frame hive, 

 and I wouldn't tolerate the latter without a 

 dummy. [The reason the dummy was not 

 put in the ten-frame hive was because when 

 the eight-frame was widened out so as to take 

 in a dummy there was very little demand 

 for the ten-frame hive. It was expected 

 that it would soon go out altogether. But 

 gradually, and before the manufacturers 

 knew it, there were as many ten-frame sold 

 as eight-frame, and now some of them are 

 wishing they could make the change with- 

 out throwing every thing out of gear. If 

 they were to make the change now, the new 

 ten-frame hives would not fit those of older 

 make. Supers and covers of the older type 

 would be too narrow for the newer ones. 

 Most of the factories probably concluded 

 that the confusion would not counterbalance 

 the slight advantage gained. Sometimes 

 bee-keepers in the field do not understand 

 that, however desirable a change may be, 

 the manufacturer can not afford to give his 

 customers stuff that will not match materi- 

 al bought at a jjrevious date. Experience 

 shows that it would make all kinds of trou- 

 ble.— Ed.] 



