1879 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTUKE. 



21 



the honey yield has ceased, for they will 

 crowd into the hives when they are opened 

 to cut out queen cells, etc. Is this so. my 

 friends? To be sure it is not. You can 

 hue your honey house as clean as your 

 kitchen, and you can have every particle of 

 honey cleaned up. You can have a wash 

 basin and cloth, and just the moment a drop 

 falls, you can. if you hive a mind to, get 

 right down on your knees and clean it up. 

 You can not afford to take so much time? I 

 verily believe it will take less time to have 

 everything neat, and always in place, than it 

 will to have such scenes of disorder. I could 

 sit down and cry, many times, if I thought 

 it would do any good, to see young people 

 defeat themseh as, and make themselves un- 

 happy too, by their h • >dless. careless way of 

 doing things. Is it because they have not 

 been trained differently? Perhaps so. and 

 perhaps experience is the best teacher. Ex- 

 perience is a very slow teacher, and I would 

 like to stir you all up. and have you get along 

 faster in habits of neatness, for I know you 

 all admire a neat apiary nearly, if not quite, 

 as much as I do. 



A GREAT DISCOVERY. 



I have often, when beset by robbers du- 

 ring some experiment I wanted to make in 

 the fall of the year, longed for some place 

 where I could carry a single hive, where it 

 would be entirely free from bees of other 

 hives. I first thought of some spot in the 

 country, where there were no bees within a 

 couple of miles, but as such a soot would be 

 difficult to find here, I thought of a wire 

 cloth house; but then, you know, t'n bees 

 of my one hive would tiy against fi > wires, 

 and so that would not be free from difficul- 

 ties either. I have before mentioned my 

 troubles in trying to people the house apiary, 

 in the fall. Queens were already hatched in 

 the lamp nursery, and unless the colonies 

 were divided at once, so as to make use of 

 them, all would be lost. The surplus combs 

 for making these late swarms were in the 

 upper stories, and the robbers knew it; for 

 no soner was a cap raised than they were on 

 hand, and before I could get the brood combs 

 to g ) with them (I found that the bees would 

 not adhere even to their own combs, unless 

 soni ■ of them contained unsealed brood), a 

 smart traffic would be under way. It came 

 night, and my hives and queens were in all 

 sorts of bad shapes. I was glad to have it 

 come night, I assure you, for I longed for 

 the time when the robbers would be com- 

 pelled, by the gathering darkness, to go 

 home. I presume many of you have had 



cause to repent trying to work with bees 

 when it began to grow dark, but I got the 

 idea into my head that, with some good 

 lamps with nice shades on them, I could do 

 my work in the evening. I went at once and 

 got a lamp, and walked around the apiary, 

 viewing the inmates of the different hives, 

 that were clustered out at the entrances, 

 humming merrily, I presume in remem- 

 brance of the rich loads they had but an hour 

 before snatched from me. Scarcely a bee- 

 took wing, and I then ventured to open a 

 hive. With the lamp on one of the posts of 

 the trellis, I found I could handle the bees 

 almost as well as in daylight, and to my in- 

 tense relief, not a bee would leave his hive, 

 no matter how many combs were held tempt- 

 ingly under their very noses. I went to 

 work, divided my hives, caught the queens, 

 and even handled vicious hybrids, with less 

 stings than I could possibly have got along 

 with in the daytime. As I passed again and 



; again the hives of the robbers who were clus- 

 tered out viewing proceedings, I could hard- 



: ly resist the temptation to place my thumb 

 at the side of my nose, to let them know how 

 much I enjoyed having completely outwitted 

 them. The last hive in the house apiary was 

 filled, unsealed brood and a queen cell given 

 to all, and all were fixed so that they could 

 repel robbers by morning, without trouble. 



i Of course, I had a good smoker, and this did 

 much towards preventing them from taking 

 wing. If the lamps were placed very near 

 the bees, occasionally a bee would buzz 

 against the light, but when placed off at a 

 distance of 6 or 8 feet, they rarely approached 

 it. I have extracted honey, late in the fall, 



' by moonlight, when it would have been im- 

 possible to do it in the daytime, on account 



' of the robbers. 



There is a kind of pillaging called borrow- 

 ing, where the bees from one hive will go 

 quietly into another, and carry away its 

 stores as fast as gathered ; but this usually 

 happens where the robbed stock is queenless, 

 or has an unfertile queen. As soon as they 

 have eggs and brood, they begin to realize 

 what the end of such work will be. This 

 state of affairs seldom goes on a great while. 

 It either results in downright robbing, or the 

 bees themselves put a stop to it. 



Caution to beginners. — The first year I 

 kept bees, I was in constant fear that they 

 would get to robbing, as I had read so much 

 about it in the books. One afternoon in 

 May, I saw a large number of bees passing 

 rapidly out and in, at a particular hive, and 

 the more I examined them the more I was 



