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GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



June 



winter, guessing' at the rest, or, what amounted to 

 the same thing, weighing the hives to come at the 

 amount of stores they had, instead of inspecting 

 every frame, as I usually do. Previous to this I 

 had used the Hill device, or something similar, to 

 give the bees a passageway over the combs during 

 winter, as is so often recommended to be used un- 

 der the bee-quilt; but frequent examinations dur- 

 ing winter satislied me that these brace -combs, 

 which I had taken so much pains to remove, an- 

 swered every purpose of the device, besides being 

 much cheaper, as well as requiring no room in my 

 shop, or lugging back and forth from shop to 

 apiary both spring and fall, which they required 

 when used. But their greatest advantage appear- 

 ed when 1 came to put on the sections, for the bees 

 seemed to consider them as little ladders on which 

 to climb up into the sections, for it was a very no- 

 ticeable fact that the bees entered the sections much 

 sooner where these brace combs were left than they 

 did those where they had been removed, and, if I re- 

 member correctly, I so wrote in Gleanings at the 

 time, advising all to remove the brace-combs from 

 the bottom of the supers, but not from the tops of 

 the frames. The next year I tried the same experi- 

 ment again, and so on for several years, till at last 

 I became thoroughly convinced that these brace- 

 combs added largely to my crop of comb honey by 

 getting the bees into the sections much sooner 

 than they otherwise would. 



Now, some may say that it is no use getting the 

 bees into the sections as soon as the first honey 

 comes in; but I claim that this has very much to do 

 with our crop of comb honey. It is not that the 

 first four or five pounds of honey stored in the sec- 

 tions could be sold for so much cash that I wish it 

 placed in the sections, but all my past experience 

 teaches me that, for every pound of honey 

 stored in the brood-nest at the commencement of 

 the season, there will be ten pounds less stored in 

 the sections that year. Let the bees once com- 

 mence to store honey in the brood-chamber thus 

 early in the season, and they are loth to enter the 

 sections at all; and, instead of giving us lots of sec- 

 tion honey, they keep crowding the queen from 

 the cells more and more till, when fall comes, we 

 have little honey for market, and our bees in poor 

 shape for winter. When we come to fully under- 

 stand this fact we shall see that, wherein these 

 brace-combs are the means of having our bees en- 

 ter the sections sooner, just in that proportion are 

 they of value to us. Try the experiment, brethren, 

 and see if, at the end of such a trial, you will not 

 be willing to put up with the inconvenience they 

 cause you, for the sake of their great value. 



CAPPING COMBS. 



Picking up a paper lately, I read an article argu- 

 ing in favor of extracting honey before it is ripen- 

 ed, in which were these words: " It stands to rea- 

 son, that, if a colony Is saved the time of capping 

 over hundreds of square inches of comb, it will 

 gather just that much more honey." This 1 claim 

 is a mistake wrought out by the writer in not be- 

 ing familiar with the laws that govern the inside of 

 the hive. If the bees which capped the cells were 

 the field bees, and if these cells feere capped in the 

 day time, then it would stand to reason, as our writ- 

 er claims; but when we come to know that (when a 

 colony is in a normal condition) it is the bees that are 

 under 16 days old which do all of the wax work, and 

 that the larger part of this wax-working is done at 



night, then we see that the capping of the combs 

 plays no important part in the production of honey. 

 The bees which cap the honey would not go into 

 the field if there were no honey to cap, so I do not 

 see where there would be any saving in keeping 

 them idle by extracting the honey before they had 

 time to cap it. If it is to be argued that it would 

 save the honey that went into wax to form the cap- 

 pings of the combs, then I answer, that, according to 

 Prof. Cook and my own observation, bees always 

 secrete wax enough for the purpose of capping 

 combs, during a honey-flow, whether combs are 

 capped or not; hence it is wasted if they have no 

 place to put it. Looking at it in the above light, 

 which is the correct one, in my opinion, there is 

 no saving to the bees in extracting uniipe honey. 

 More bulk of honey will be obtained, I admit, but 

 not because time is saved to the bees. 

 Borodino, N. Y., June 6. G. M. Doolittle. 



Friend D., I remember quite distinctly 

 that, when you paid ns that visit ten or 

 twelve years ago, one of the things you 

 were very emphatic about was that you did 

 not want the burr-combs removed from the 

 top of the frames ; and during all this dis- 

 cussion in regard to brace-combs the mat- 

 ter has been on my mind, and I have been 

 feeling quite anxious about it ; but I had 

 not got started until you took it up. Now^ 

 I think very likely you are right. But you 

 use an arrangement amounting virtually to 

 the wide frame for holding sections, put 

 over the tops of the frames. Now, if I un- 

 derstand you, you let these burr-combs go 

 right up and be built right on to the bottom- 

 bars of the wide frames. In that case you 

 have a sticky, dauby mess every time you re- 

 move the wide frames to take out the sec- 

 tions. Then you have the inconvenience 

 we all know about so well, when putting 

 them back again. May be you have some 

 way to obviate this latter matter, however 

 — I hope you have. I once decided that I 

 would let the crate or super be built fast to 

 the tops of the frames, and let them remain 

 there during the honey season, taking out 

 the sections when I want to, by removing 

 them one at a time from the crate or super, 

 to get rid of this inconvenience of breaking 

 loose from the burr-combs. I emphatically 

 agree with you in regard to getting the bees 

 at work in the sections before very much 

 honey is put into the brood-combs, although 

 I should not say that one pound in the 

 brood-nest very often prevents ten pounds 

 from going into the sections. I am inclined 

 to think there is quite a saving in the quan- 

 tity of honey by extracting before the combs 

 are capped, although I quite agree with you 

 in your statement that the bees that gather 

 the honey do not, as a rule at least, cap the 

 cells over. Ernest calls my attention to the 

 fact, friend D., that you use a deeper frame 

 than the shallow Langstroth, and there is a 

 pretty general agreement that bees will go 

 into boxes quicker from shallow Langstroth 

 combs than from the square Gallup combs. 

 He says, too, that many who are using thick 

 top-bars declare they do not hinder the bees 

 from going up into the boxes, even though 

 no burr-combs are built over these top-bars. 

 I should be very glad indeed to have our 

 good friend J. B. Hall, of Woodstock, On- 



