1917 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



121 



the apiary. Maple sugar and honey 

 make a good combination for a bee- 

 keeper to sell. 



S. D. House, of Camillus, was the 

 next man on our program. Mr. House 

 is a very extensive beekeeper, who be- 

 lieves in the sectional hive and a small 

 brood-chamber. He appears to do very 

 well with both, as we saw tons and tons 

 of honey. But what a lot of swarming ! 

 He told us of having had 18 swarms 

 come out at one time, if I am not mis- 

 taken. His success with bees is an 

 evidence that it is not so much the im- 

 plements as the beekeeper's system 

 which makes for success. 



Mr. House places his yards four or 

 five miles apart. That indicates how 

 far he believes bees will go for honey. 

 But he gave me a new idea on this 

 point. He believes that bees go farther 

 for strongly smelling blossoms, be- 

 cause these can naturally be scented 

 farther away, of course. This reason- 

 ing is so obviously and plainly correct 

 that I do not understand why we did 

 not think of it ourselves. That is why, 

 in buckwheat sections, the bees are 

 claimed to travel farther than in many 

 other sections, where the honey is less 

 odorous. 



They had an epidemic on adult bees 

 during the spring of 1916, from June 20 

 to 25, which resembled the Isle of 

 Wight disease, the bees dying in hun- 

 dreds in front of the hives, without 

 apparent cause. It was during a period 

 of excessive moisture and the affected 

 bees were three weeks old or older. 

 Some colonies were very much weak- 

 ened by it. The reader will remember 

 that a similar trouble was reported 

 from Amherst at about the same date 

 in similar weather conditions. 



Mr. House supersedes his queens 

 every year and holds this operation is 

 worth easily $2.00 per colony. He wants 

 late reared queens, so their fertility 

 may be at its highest in the spring. 

 But this is evidently not sufficient to 

 hinder natural swarming. 



Our next visit was to Mr. Irving 

 Kenyon, with whom we remained but 

 an hour or two. Mr. Kenyon's honey 



crops have been subject to a peculiar 

 trouble during the past two years. 

 Some of it ferments in the cells, after 

 it is capped over, and often bursts the 

 capping. The trouble has existed in 

 his product for several years, but has 

 been on the increase lately. He won- 

 ders whether it is due to a microbe 

 within the hives, perpetuating itself 

 from year to year, or whether it is due 

 to the location. I thought that it might 

 be due to some special bloom. Can any 

 of our readers suggest a possible ex- 

 planation ? The trouble has been so 

 annoying that our friend thought of 

 resorting to the extreme remedy of 

 transferring all his bees upon sheets 

 of foundation in the spring and render- 

 ing all the old combs into wax. 



On the morning of another fine day, 

 we visited Mr. Oscar Dines, at his api- 

 ary, on a hillside of the Onondaga 

 Indian Reservation. And let me say at 

 once, for the benefit of our foreign 

 readers, that although several hundred 

 Indians are still living there, they are 



of a very modern type, their women 

 wearing clothes of the latest fashion 

 when coming to the city. Were it not 

 for their broad smooth faces, beardless 

 in all cases, their smooth coal-black 

 hair, their reddish skin, no one could 

 imagiiie them to be descendants of the 

 proud, cruel aborigenes, depicted less 

 than a century ago by Fenimore 

 Cooper, and living exclusively on the 

 fruit of the chase. 



Mr. Dines lives in town. His apiary 

 of some 300 colonies is on a pretty 

 slope, in a good region, a half mile or 

 so from the end of the interurban line. 

 His crop was immense, his bees beauti- 

 ful Italians, with gentle disposition. 

 He, like friend House, uses a sectional 

 hive, the frames of which hang freely 

 and are a delight to handle; they are 

 so short and convenient. We opened 

 several hives together and he expressed 

 to me his great enjoyment of beekeep- 

 ing. He is happy among his bees. 

 When he sent me the accompanying 

 photo of his apiary, he wrote in part : 



QUEEN-CAGE BY MR. CLARK 

 Air is given to the bees from every side 



DOOLITTLE ic CLARK IN MR. CLARK'S APIARY NEAR BORODINO 



" Enclosed you will find a remembrance 

 of :,the pleasant visit we'had at my api- 

 ary, which was only too short for what 

 we wanted to say. The honey house is 

 in the back ground; the;;lady is my 

 daughter, Mrs. Parker; the man stand- 

 ing you recognize. The colony that 

 yielded so much honey is not visible 

 in the picture. My honey is all sold 

 and shipped away and everything 

 cleaned up and put in its place ready 

 for next season." 



Mr. Dines is the inventor of a very 

 simple swarm-catching device, to be 

 used however only when you are in the 

 apiary and see a swarm in the act of 

 emerging. It consists of a cage made 

 of two boards for a frame work and 

 four sides of wire mesh, with an open- 

 ing across one end to fit on the en- 

 trance of the hive. This cage is placed 

 in front of the colony that is in the act 

 of swarming, and the bees rush into it, 

 since they cannot do otherwise. 



If the queen has been caught with it, 

 it is only necessary to carry this cage 

 to the front of an empty hive and the 

 bees will hive themselves. Two or 

 three of these cages, in very active 

 swarming time, give the apiarist quite 

 a relief, as each of them takes care of a 

 swarm without trouble. 



