302 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CUlTUKE. 



Aug. 



shape, and color of large strawberries, have 

 already made their appearance, although the 

 seed was only sown in May. This is quite 

 an important matter, as ordinary clovers 

 require two seasons. Lucerne is also in 

 bloom, sown at the same time. These queer 

 plants that seem to bridge over the space 

 between the clover family and the pea family, 

 as they stand side by side in their respective 

 beds, almost make one feel solemn. A little 

 further along, are some rows of vetches. 

 These are peas undeniably ; for they have not 

 only tendrils, but pods also. Yet, as if to help 

 you not to decide too hastily, near by stands 

 the Alfalfa which has such a combination of 

 the pea and clover, not only in blossoms but 

 leaves also, that you are forced to think 

 them all country cousins, that have been 

 unconsciously brought from different nations 

 of the earth, perhaps after the lapse of ages. 

 back again side by side. O, Dame Nature ! 

 how little do we know of ways and means 

 by which you have brought things around as 

 they are ! The bees evidently recognize the 

 part they have to play in the drama, for a 

 huge bumble bee was just now making him- 

 self at home on a head of the scarlet clover. 



WE MUST HAVE THAT HONEY. 



fHE honey of the fragrant, omnipresent, red 

 clover fields, of course. We must have it. It 

 is immense in quantity. We might almost 

 doubt whether all other sources combined furnish 

 as much nectar as is locked up in plain sight, but 

 quite out of our reach in the red clover. It is excel- 

 lent in quality; no one who ever robbed a bumble 

 bee's nest need have any doubt of that. The long 

 and the short of it is, we must have it. Old Cato 

 used to end all his speeches, no matter what the 

 subject of the speech was, with "Carthage must be 

 destroyed." Let's keep on reiterating, "We must 

 have that honey," until we get it. 



A few efforts have been made already. Some in- 

 genious chap brought out a cross between the red 

 clover and the white under the name of Alsike clov- 

 er. Farmers were to drop red clover and sow this ; 

 and all lovers of honey were to be happy. No go. 

 Some fields of Alsike may continue to be sown, but 

 it can never displace the old style clover. Visions 

 of an improved bee, with a longer snout to reach 

 that honey, have floated round the heads of some 

 apiarians. You, for one, respected teacher of the 

 class, have given tongue to aspirations of this sort. 

 Comb was to be made gradually bigger and bigger, 

 by enlarging the fdfi., and the bee was to grow big- 

 enough to fill the cells, &c. &c. Alas ! the June No. 

 shows, in your reply to the California man who has 

 this idea on the brain, that you have soured on the 

 scheme ! The writer has no doubt that the honey 

 bee could be enlarged in size —providing, of course, 

 that one went at the work in the right way— but it is 

 to be feared that we should need to more than double 

 the length of our bee's proboscis before we could 

 reach our object in that way. To do this, we might 

 have to double the other dimensions of the bee also. 

 All solids have three dimensions, and increase by 

 cubes. Our clover bee would thus be 1x2x2x2, equal 

 to 8, times as bulky as the common bee— a bumble 

 bee outright. The weight of such bees might be ex- 

 pected to break down the new tender comb while 

 being built. They would be too heavy to hang to- 

 gether in festoons or masses. Thin honey would 



not stay in cells of such a size. So much food 

 would be required that the bees would eat their own 

 heads off, so to speak In short, the prospect of get- 

 ting that honey by means of an improved bee is not 

 bright. Some increase in the size of the honey bee 

 may, or may not, be profitable; but any great in- 

 crease would almost certainly be a loss. 



Were it desirable that sheep should feed on acorns 

 and pick them from the trees, we should find it 

 well nigh impossible to breed a sheep large enough 

 to do such tall pasturing. If, by any chance, we 

 succeeded in getting sheep tall enough to reach the 

 acorns we should certainly fail financially, in the 

 business of producing wool, at market rates, from a 

 herd of such mastodons. The only practicable way 

 would be to dwarf the oak, and so bring the acorns 

 down within the reach of ordinary sheep. To get at 

 the gist of the matter, without any further verbiage, 

 we may reasonably hope to get that honey by modi- 

 fying the red clover. Both animals and plants are 

 plastic, and can be varied to almost any reasonable 

 degree. We can doubtless produce a variety of the 

 clover that shall retain the identity of the plant, and 

 all the good farm qualities of the old familiar clover, 

 and yet expose its honey in a short tubed flower. 

 The lucky ABC boy who accomplishes this must be 

 allowed to sell quite small packages of seed, for 25c. 

 each, for a spell. Next, the heavy chaps who raise 

 honey by the ton must club together and establish a 

 clover seed plantation. Next, the farmers within a 

 mile of the apiaries must be furnished with the im- 

 proved seed at bare, absolute cost, and, behold ! the 

 sweet task is accomplished, and we have that honey. 

 Working for this object need not be expensive, or 

 make very great demands upon one's time. Almost 

 any one who can have the use of a little patch of 

 ground, or even space to put a dozen flower-pots, 

 may try for the prize. Those flighty individuals 

 who usually drop things after going a little way 

 with them might as well not begin, for it will be a 

 work of years. I will try and be one to do some 

 practical work in this direction; let us have a hund- 

 red others engaged. 



As a careful reconnoissance is no mean step to- 

 wards carrying a difficult position, we proceed to 

 examine a clover head. Each tiny flower of the 

 head has a tube about 42 hundreths of an inch in 

 length. The length varies somewhat on different 

 plants; some will be 44 hundredths or longer, some 

 only 38, or even less, the extreme range being from 

 30 to 50. We must select plants with short tubes, 

 plant their seeds, select again from the new crop, 

 and so on, working shorter and shorter as fast as we 

 can. Some of us must perform the delicate opera- 

 tion of filling a lot of these tubes with bright colored 

 syrup, and letting the bees take out all they can of 

 it. Then, by careful measurement, we can tell how 

 many hundredths of an inch a bee can draw honey ; 

 and thus we shall know how far off we are from our 

 wished for clover. Each full sized clover head has 

 from 90 to 200 separate flowers or tubes. It will 

 probably be to our interest to encourage heads with 

 few flowers, rather than those with many. It is 

 likely that the tubes grow longer than they other- 

 wise would by mutual crowding, just as sapliugs in 

 the forest do; and, to make them shorter, we must 

 make them thinner. Some heads are flatfish, some 

 round, and some elongated. Elongation favors the 

 thinning out process, and should be encouraged, 

 probably, and very long heads with 160 flowers are 

 better than flat ones with 100. A very decided differ- 



