1874 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



satisfied to recommend sugar in place of 

 lioney we would advise him to carefully re- 

 cord the results of the great number of prac- 

 tical experiments made of that kind. 



A remark made in the A. B. J. intended to 

 •express our disapproval of the plan of not giv- 

 ing residences of correspondents, perhaps impli- 

 ed more than we intended it should, but we con- 

 fess to a dislike of finding when we reach the 

 •end of an article that 'twas from plain "John 

 Smith" with no other earthly clue to his where- 

 abouts; and although we cannot say we feel 

 satisfied, 'tis the better way, we must admit 

 we have had the subject presented us from a 

 standpoint of view we had not heretofore con- 

 sidered, and that there are some very cogent 

 reasons for withholding the full name and ad- 

 dress. We hope we shall never be unwilling 

 to acknowledge an error or injustice when sat- 

 isfied we have committed one, whether it be 

 commonly considered derogatory to the Edit- 

 orial character or not. 



Filling pieces of comb with syrup as Mr 

 King advises might have given very good sat- 

 isfaction in 1863, but we fear our modern Api- 

 arist would hardly be content with so slow 

 and laborious a method ; and does he consider 

 too that in selling the Peabody Extractor he 

 encumbers his patrons with a patented machine 

 that must be eventually laid aside for the supe- 

 rior light running home-made ones ? 'Twould 

 be idle to argue a point that demonstrates it- 

 self so readily by actual experiment. 



We most heartily approve of Mr King's 

 method of furnishing hives of any kind order- 

 ed from manufactories close at hand, and we 

 commend the Dec. No. of the Magazine as par- 

 ticular! v valuable. 



We were certainly much pleased to receive 

 Mrs. Tupper's Journal for November done up in 

 a style so neat, and with such an attractive 

 cover that we never should have recognized 

 the old National Bee Journal at all, were it not 

 for the name. We shall have to conclude that 

 woman's taste is certainly equal, if not superior 

 to that of the sterner sex, in such matters. 

 The typography and general appearance of the 

 whole fully agrees with "its appearance exter- 

 nally, and the whole work certainly does her 

 credit. We wish her a large list of sub- 

 scribers. Mrs. Tupper's Journal is cer- 

 tainly valuable, it could not well be otherwise, 

 and right here we would ask why it can not 

 be called Mrs. Tupper' s Journal, and thus aid in 

 making it j)ossible to explain to our friends 

 that the National Bee Journal, was a separate 



institution from the National Agriculturist 

 and Bee-keepers Journal of N. Y. 



Mrs. T. says "Novice does not differ so wide- 

 ly from other Bee-keepers as he would have us 

 suppose," which we are well aware of, for what 

 was considered some of his most extreme riews 

 a year or two ago are now being echoed in a 

 way that would sound very much like some 

 who say when forced to concede a point, "why, 

 we always said so." Now Mrs. T. your other 

 remark that : "It has always appeared to us 

 singular, to say the least, that in no one of our 

 bee journals is found mention of another — 

 each one ignoring utterly the existence of an- 

 other," was rough on us, for in our opening No, 

 we certainly did notice all the Journals, and 

 there were more then than now, and we did 

 also notice your own National Journal so well 

 that one of the associate Editors wrote "awful 

 bad" to us ; if you meant that Gleanings wasn't 

 a Journal we shall feel worse still, for our Feb. 

 No. informed you that 'twas constituted a 

 Monthly as soon as the first No. was before 

 the public. 



If Adair's theory that bees breathe through 

 their wings be true, and that "a queen with a 

 clipped wing is like a man who still lives 

 though a part of his lungs be gone," how will 

 he explain the fact of queen's living and thri- 

 ving with no wings V Is it possible in his expe- 

 rience practically, he has seen no such? We 

 remember one of our best queens, in fact the 

 mother of the colony that gave us the 330 lbs. 

 in a season, had both wings gnawed oft* close, 

 probably in being introduced, and she was 

 equally prolific for two seasons at least. 



Queens two or three years old are frequently 

 almost destitute of wings. Our opinion of 

 conventions was mainly intended for those 

 who had not made bee-keeping profitable, and 

 we have no reason yet to change our decision, 

 that those who make their bees most profitable 

 are not those who are foremost at our large 

 conventions. Mrs. Tupper's report of the North 

 American Society certainly contains much of 

 value, and we tender her our thanks for giving 

 it to the people in a correct and valuable shape, 

 but we are pained to find that she again insists 

 that Extracting injures the brood, totally ig- 

 noring the mass of evidence from those who 

 have for years been in the habit of extracting 

 honey by the ton. If conventions are to be 

 valuable they should embody at least enough 

 practical bee-keepers to keep down Adair's 

 folly, and Mrs. Tupper's inexperience with the 

 extractor. 



It may be well to add that 'tis only necessary 

 to clip a very small portion (to avoid marring 

 their beauty) of one wing of the queen to pre- 

 vent loss in swarming; we have lately been 

 informed that Adam Grim clips the wings of 

 his queens in his whole Apiary of nearly 1000 

 colonies. 



