c 



ur 



474 



DOOLITTLE 

 i s inentioii- 

 e d , page 

 397, July Glean- 

 ings, as "the 

 first man to dem- 

 onstrate that 

 queens can be 

 reared in an up- 

 per story with a 



laying queen below." G. M. Doolittle is 

 the man who deserves credit for making- 

 practical use of it, and bringing it into 

 prominence, but he never claimed to be the 

 man who first discovered that a cfueen 

 might be reared over a colony with a lay- 

 ing queen. In ' ' Doolittle on Queen-rear- 

 ing, " page 93, edition of 1889, he says: 



"At about this time, I saw in some of 

 the bee papers, that, by accident, a queen 

 had become fertilized, in an upper stoiy of 

 a hive worked for extracted honej^ the same 

 having a laying queen below, with a queen- 

 excluding honey-ljoard between the upper 

 and lower story, the queen having gone out 

 to meet the drone thru an opening which 

 had been left between the upper hive and 

 the queen-excluder. I was not long in see- 

 ing where my hobby might now be brought 

 to the desired consummation, so I began 

 experimenting. ' ' 



That first case of "accident" Doolittle 

 has evidently mixed a little with things 

 that were done afterward, and as a matter 

 of history it may be well to tell how the 

 firsit case on record happened. It was this 

 way: A beekeeper had on hand a number 

 of empty brood-combs that he wanted to 

 put in the care of bees, to prevent the rav- 

 ages of the bee moth. He piled them up 

 several stories high over a hive with a lay- 

 ing queen. Feeling afraid that the bees 

 might not pay much attention to the upper- 

 most combs, he put in the upper story a 

 comb of brood. No excluder was used; 

 merely the frame of brood was a long way 

 from the queen. No attention was paid to 

 the pile for some weeks, when he was great- 

 ly surprised to find a nice brood-nest in the 

 upper story, and a queen with whole wings 

 busy laying. No opening had been inten- 

 tionally left thru which the queen might go 

 on her wedding-trip; that was another acci- 

 dent. That beekeeper deserves no special 

 credit for his discovery — he couldn't help 

 himself — but when he published it Doolit- 

 tle, with his keen perceptions, put it into 



practical use. 



* * * 



Editor Townsend has in The Domestic 

 Beekeeper a department that is rich in 

 information, in which he answers questions 

 about his own practice in beekeeping. From 

 the June niimber I cull the following: 



' ' Mr. Townsend was successful in pro- 

 ducing extracted honey without excluders, 

 the plan being to add empty supers on top, 

 the theory being to keep the queen below by 

 so doing. But it is a mistake to give sur- 

 plus room enough to hold the brood the colo- 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



STRAY STRAWS 



3 



Dr. C. C. MiUer 



^^^^^^^^^^ 



T=J 



August, 1918 



ny would natur- 

 ally rear, and 

 also room for 

 the surplus hon- 

 ey. You must 

 give- only room 

 for the surplus 

 honey, 'forcing 

 the queen b e - 

 low, especially 

 toward the close of the season.' " 



' ' We used to paper our inside-wintered 

 bees during the spring, but do not any more, 

 and as far as we can see we get just the 

 same results. Mr. S. D. Chapman, Mance- 

 lona; Mich., papered every other colony in 

 one of his yards one spring, and he could 

 not see any difference in honey secured be- 

 tween those papered and those not paper- 

 ed." 



* * * 



Irving Kenyon, according to a report in 

 The American Bee Journal, page 205, June, 

 has suffered from a peculiar trouble, the 

 honey fermenting in the cells and often 

 bursting the cappings, being decidedly sour. 

 He thought it might be due to a microbe 

 within the hives, perpetuating itself from 

 year to year, and finally resorted to the ex- 

 treme remedy of shaking all his bees upon 

 sheets of foundation in the spring and melt- 

 ing up the old combs into wax, the same 

 as in treating American foul brcjod. Mr. 

 Kenyon says: "I don't pretend to know 

 the cause of this trouble, but after 15 years' 

 experience with it I am well satisfied that it 

 is contagious and is spread by robbing. Not 

 having a single colony tha.t did not show it 

 in 1916, in 1917, after shaking, I saw it in 

 less than one-fourth of one per cent of the 

 honey. I expect to shake again this sea- 

 son, and think that will clean it out en- 

 tirely. ' ' 



In June Domestic Beekeeper, page 170, 

 honey is reported as going wrong in much 

 the same way, and Editor Townsend ven- 

 tures the guess that there is a fungus in 

 nectar (similar to other sweets of same con- 

 sistency), which is usually forced out of 

 the nectar in the process of evaporating. 

 He thinks it may be the fault of the season 

 — a cold period during the honey flow- — and 

 that some colonies may have more of the 

 trouble than others, in which case a change 

 of queens might be advisable. 



Last winter I contracted a cough that was 

 exceedingly persistent, and for a time I was 

 a bit anxious lest it get the better of me. 

 After taking a good deal of the stuff the 

 doctor prescribed, and I should add after 

 partly overcoming the cough, I substituted 

 for other medicine candied extracted honey. 

 I 'd take a chunk perhaps the size of a black 

 walnut, put it in my cheek, and let it slow- 

 ly dissolve there. The result was very satis- 

 factory. I'm not ready to say that honey 

 is better than a good cough medicine pre- 

 scribed by a capable physician, but I'm sure 



