1895 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



673 



basswood-orchard, run for extracted honey, 

 very close attention; and our apiarist was too 

 busy with the home bci's to give very much of 

 his time. The consequence has been, that the 

 out bees have been somewhat neglected, as will 

 appear later on. 



On the 3Lst of August, feeling much better, 

 and strong enough to push a wheel, I took a 

 run down and looked over the bees. Prior to 

 this during the basswood bloom our men had 

 gone down once or twice and put on extra 

 stories, so that there might be room. They 

 were not visited again until I went on the date 

 mentioned; and as I knew they had been stor- 

 ing honey rapidly at the time of putting on 

 the supers, I was not surprised to see the same 

 pretty well filled then. 



As I pulled up several supers, and found them 

 crammed full of honey, and saw here and there 

 burr-combs built between the two-stories, and 

 on top of those thick-top-bar frames at that, 

 the thought came to me, "There, W. Z. H. 

 would have the laugh on me if he could be here 

 now, after wb it I wrote about the scarcity of 

 burr-combs over thick top-bars, on page 636." 

 Thi-J was something I had never seen before, 

 and I said to myself, " No, I won't be laughed 

 at yet; there is a cause for it." And, sure 

 enough, in the very instances where burr- 

 combs were built between the two parts of the 

 hives, I discovered that the upper stories were 

 crowded to their nt))ii)St capacity; no, there 

 was not one cell of room left. What else could 

 the poor bees do than to chink in burr-combs 

 in the spaces they are ordinarily supposed to 

 leave clear? You see the facts are here: The 

 apiary, as I have previously explained, had 

 been neglected, and those colonies that had 

 burr-combs had not been given sufficient 

 room in the first place; that is, they greatly 

 exceeded the expectations of the men who put 

 on their supers in the first place. In an apiary 

 properly carel for, no burr-combs would have 

 appeared at all; indeed, there were none — ab- 

 solutely none — in tho^o hives that were not 

 " clear crammed jam full." 



Of course, every bee-keeper knows it is a 

 serious waste to let hives get so full of honey, 

 to say nothing of the tendeny to encourage 

 swarming and its attendant loafing. I do not 

 therefore think what I said in regard to the 

 burr combs in question was too strong in 

 apiaries that are properly cared for;* and 

 when the bee-keeper himself keeps ahead of 

 the bees, as he always should do, that intoler- 

 able nuisance, burr-combs, is done away with. 



THOSE FIVE-BA.NDERS. 



In the way of honey, the three-banded leath- 

 er-colored bees were away ahead: and, oh how 

 much pleasanter to handle! Moreover, the 



* Are not all the reported cases of burr-combs 

 over thick-tops due to expensive and wasteful over- 

 crowding ? 



yellow fellows nosing around in a most disa- 

 greeable way, trying here and there to get a sip 

 of honey while I was making an examination. 



By the way, we had a bad robbing-spell, I 

 am sorry to confess, at our home yard a few 

 days ago. This is, you know, devoted to queien- 

 rearing; and it seems one of the small nuclei 

 failed to make the proper defense, and before we 

 knew it there was an uproar. It was a most 

 noticeable fact that the leaders in this robbing 

 were the extra-yellow bees, and there are only 

 three or four colonies of them now in the whole 

 apiary of over 300 colonies and nuclei. Our 

 Mr. Spafford, who has charge of the home yard, 

 says he wants no more of them, and I am sure I 

 don't; and as a matter of fact we have been 

 getting rid of them as rapidly as possible, 



BEE-ESCAPES, 



I had a good chance to test the relative 

 merits of the Porter and the Reese escapes. I 

 lifted up the supers, put the escapes on that 

 afternoon, and two days afterward our men 

 called down with a horse and wagon, followed 

 a little later by your humble servant. I was 

 very anxious to see what the escapes would do; 

 and after two days I was a little surprised and 

 a little disappointed to see in some cases that 

 the bees had not all evacuated. But it was 

 noticeable that the Porter gave us the cleanest 

 supers. A little smoking-down finished up the 

 job. The honey was taken ofl' without remov- 

 ing a single frame. The escapes have on pre- 

 vious occasions worked a little more promptly. 

 Why they did not in the present instance, I do 

 not know, unless it was that the colonies were 

 extra strong. In all such instances I put on a 

 super with empty combs or foundation, to af- 

 ford them clustering-room. 



LARGE COLONIES FOK HONEY. 



As has been previously the case, the large 

 colonies of two and three eight-framers did 

 altogether the best In honey. Colonies occu- 

 pying two eight-frame stories generally filled 

 both of them. In some instances they filled 

 two stories, or a story and a half, with surplus 

 extracted honey. 



HALF-STORY EXTRACTING -SUPERS. 



I was greatly pleased with the working of 

 these supers. They were easy to handle; i. (., 

 to lift, and the queens kept clear of them. In 

 some cases the queens went into the full-depth 

 extracting-supers, but not in one instance did 

 they go into the half-depths; but the bees 

 themselves occupied the one as readily as the 

 other. In fact, they just filled them with hon- 

 ey; and, oh how much pleasanter it was to lift 

 the half-depths, one at a time, to put the bee- 

 scapes under! 



It may be well to remark in this connection, 

 that these supers had wide top-bars, and, of 

 course, the queens did not seem inclined to lay 



