152 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Apr. 



use them in forming- nuclei; this helps to keep down 

 the swarming fever. When these colonies get their 

 hives full of brood and honey, and ihe \ield of hon- 

 ey is good, I put on upper stories filled with empty 

 combs; or, if 1 am a little "short" of empty combs, I 

 fill each alternate frame with fdn. 1 tell you ihese 

 empty combs are another great "institution;" one 

 secret of my success is in having a good supply of 

 these; and I always "manage" (either by purchasing 

 them of bee-keepers who let their bees die, and are 

 disgusted with the business, or by having fdn. 

 drawn out during the buckwheat honey harvest) to 

 have a good supply. A bee-keeper who will give 

 his bees all the empty combs that they can fill du- 

 ring a good yield from basswood will be surprised 

 at the amount of honey that the little fellows will 

 stow away. My bees have not filled a frame with 

 natural comb during the last two years, and I don't 

 intend that they shall ever fill another. When the 

 combs in an upper story are filled with honey, and 

 the bees don't begin to seal it over, I raise the upper 

 story and put another story filled with empty combs 

 between that and the lower story. During a good 

 yield of honey, these upper stories are examined 

 every three or four days, and whenever a comb is 

 found in which the honey is sealed one-third of the 

 way down from the top it is removed to be extract- 

 ed, and an empty comb put in its place. I seldom 

 extract from the lower stories. Colonies that are 

 building queen cells, having little brood to care for, 

 soon till their combs with honey; these combs, I re- 

 move for extracting, filling their places with empty 

 combs. Wnen the yield of honey is good, I give the 

 strongest nuclei extra combs to fill; ; nd when the 

 honey is sufficiently ripened, I extract it. In the 

 fall, the light swarms and nuclei are united. 



I make queen rearing- my first object, giving all 

 of my bees plenty of combs to fill, and when the 

 honey is ripe I extract it. There doesn't that seem 

 simple and easy enough? 



W. Z. Hutchinson. 



P. S.— If my method of queen rearing can be im- 

 proved, will some one please tell me where I am at 

 fault? W. Z. H. 



Rogersvllle, Genesee Co., Mich. 



Very good, friend H. I do not know how 

 I can improve on your very plain instruct- 

 ions, or add anything, unless it be to suggest 

 that a good many are claiming that cells 

 reared under the natural swarming impulse 

 are superior to those raised as you suggest. 

 While I am by no means prepared to accept 

 this as yet, I would advise carefully compar- 

 ing queens reared as you suggest, with 

 those of natural swarming. Most of us have 

 queens in our apiaries, reared both ways. 

 Let us see if we can detect a difference. 



COMB FOUNDATION. 



RECENT IMPROVEMENTS. 



l ANY keen and ingenious minds are 

 busily at work at the problems I gave 

 you on page 8s, February No., but, al- 

 though considerable progress has been made, 

 and the prospect is that we shall succeed ul- 

 timately, it is so much a work of the multi- 

 tude I hardly know who will merit the $100 

 reward. It seems to be like th« way in 

 which the bees themselves make comb; one 

 takes it up and gives it a twist or turn, and 



then another takes it up and improves it a 

 little, and so it grows. I am ready to hand 

 over the reward, but I do not know but we 

 shall have to choose a committee to decide 

 to whom it belongs. I am sorry to say, some 

 have written unkindly in the matter already. 

 A great many have tried for the prize who 

 have not taken Gleanings in years past, 

 and have therefore wasted time and money 

 in going over old experiments. Friend Har- 

 rison's idea of making a machine like a 

 book, dipping only the inside plate, while 

 the covers are folded back, has been given a 

 great many times. Two or three different 

 parties have succeeded in making very fair 

 fdn. in small pieces by pouring the melted 

 wax into a plaster-of-paiis mold. By heat- 

 ing the mold up to about 150°, the wax will 

 run into a space almost as thin as natural 

 comb, but the whole machine must be cooled 

 before the fdn. can be taken out, and this 

 process soon destroys the plaster cast. These 

 people naturally thought metal would work 

 as well, bnt you can not saturate metal with 

 water, as you do plaster, and the heating 

 will therefore cause the wax to stick fast to 

 it. 



Sheets of soft wax with holes punched at 

 the right distance apart will be readily used 

 by the bees, and if the walls are not com- 

 pressed as in our usual fdn., there will be 

 little or no sagging. The editor of the Brit- 

 ish Bee Journal has said considerable of late 

 about making rolls for this purpose, by driv- 

 ing round-headed nails into wooden rollers. 

 This was suggested and tried several years 

 ago in our country, but we found it difficult 

 to get nails or tacks all of one size, and to 

 drive them with sufficient accuracy, although 

 we did enough to demonstrate that the bees 

 would use it. The fdn. known as the Dun- 

 ham, because the mills are made by Mrs. 

 Frances Dunham, of DePere, Wis., are much 

 on this plan. Below we give an engraving 

 of the machine. 



DUNHAM'S FOUNDATION MACHINE. 



Our readers may remember her as the one 

 who devised the Dunham feeder, for which 

 I paid her $25.00, some years ago. She has, 

 without doubt, the credit of making the 

 prettiest-looking machine, in print at least, 

 of any in the market. Here is the letter 



