1880 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



437 



worm is easily seen, by a whitish line, just 

 under the caps of the solid sealed brood. 

 Moth worms are almost unknown in our 

 apiary, unless in combs that have been ex- 

 posed before they were given to the bees, as 

 mentioned above. 



QUEENS THAT DO NOT LAY WHEN OF THE PROPER 

 AGE. 



I had a young queen hatched about the first of 

 July, and when I thought it time for her to be lay- 

 ing I looked into the hive. She was not laying. I 

 waited about three weeks from the time she was 

 hatched, and still she did not lay. She was an Ital- 

 ian and was small but seemed to be perfect other- 

 wise. I took her out and put in the one you 

 sent me. Can you tell whether she would have laid 

 if she had been left in the hive? or do queens some- 

 times fail to lay at all? C. A. Johnston. 



Somerset, Pulaski Co., Ky., Aug. 2, 1880. 



It is not very rare to find queens that nev- 

 er lay at all, as you will see by the A B C. 

 AVe usually toss them up at two weeks old, 

 to see if they fly easily. There is no danger 

 in doing this, for, if they can fly, they have 

 been out and in many times, and will go in 

 readily as soon as they swing round a little. 

 If they cannot fly readily, they might as well 

 be lost as not. Although they sometimes 

 begin to lay and make good queens after 3 

 weeks old, we usually think best to remove 

 them unless we And eggs after the 20th day. 

 If we are short of room, we sometimes re- 

 move them sooner. Queens that do not lay 

 until so late a period are always pretty liable 

 to prove drone layers. 



HONEY; PROFIT ON IN SELLING. 



Bees have done very poorly until now, when they 

 are at work on buckwheat. Why should the grocer 

 have 5c. per lb. for selling our honey, and, at the 

 same time, sell berries that are perishable for 2c. 

 per quart? R. B. Parker. 



La Fayette, Ind., Aug. 4, 1880. 



The berries are sure sale, or almost sure. 

 They are quickly and easily handled, and 

 out of the way. Honey is sticky and dauby, 

 or almost always so. Very often the packa- 

 ges are so large that the dealer is asked to 

 divide them, and the remnant frequently is 

 unsightly and remains on his hands. Ber- 

 ries are often bought at 8c, and sold for 10. 

 If he buys comb honey at 20, and sells it for 

 25, he makes exactly the same per cent on 

 the money invested. I have put it 20, be- 

 cause a neighbor has just taken his honey to 

 Cleveland, and obtained 20c. at wholesale 

 for his whole crop, that was put up in the 

 1 lb. sections. If you cannot get dealers to 

 handle your honey for a profit of 20 per cent, 

 and take pains to push sales too, I think it 

 must be the fault of the way in which you 

 put it up. 



INTRODUCING QUEENS BY W. L. KING'S PLAN. 



As soon as the queen comes, I go to the hive I wish 

 to introduce her to, and take out the old queen. 

 Now we will suppose our swarm to be queenless. 

 Hold on; that won't do. There is to be no suppos- 

 ing any thing about it. We must know our swarm 

 is queenless. We can tell this, first, by queen cells; 

 and, secondly, by the. actions of the bees. If you 

 have just taken the old queen out, close the hive, 

 and, if there is no other queen in the hive, they will 

 very soon be running all over and through the hive 

 hunting the queen. Now is the time when they will 



accept the queen if rightly introduced. Take an 

 empty hive, place it near the old one, take out a 

 card of brood, brush off every bee, being careful 

 that none are hid in the corners, hang this in the 

 centre of the hive, and then do the same with two 

 more cards. Now place your queen and accompa- 

 nying bees on these combs, close your hive, and, if 

 you are not in a great hurry, wait one hour. This 

 will give the queen and bees time to become thor- 

 oughly scented by the comb. Now take out the bal- 

 ance of the combs, brush the bees off in front of the 

 new hive, and drive them in with a little smoke. 

 Hang the combs in the hive, close it, shake the rest 

 of the bees out of the old hive in front of the new 

 one, drive them in, set the new hive on the old stand, 

 and you are done. I have never lost a queen, or had 

 one balled, when I introduced in this way. I am of 

 the opinion that the best time to introduce a queen 

 is when the bees first discover that their queen is 

 gone, and are running wild to find her. I have twice, 

 this summer, taken a queen out of a hive and, just 

 as soon as I could walk twelve feet, dropped her into 

 a swarm that I had taken a queen from not twenty 

 minutes before. They were hunting all over for the 

 queen. Of course, I would not dare do this with a 

 six-dollar queen. 



SEPARATORS OF STRIPS OF WOOD. 



For separators, instead of wire take veneering 1-16 

 of an inch thick, cut it into strips H inch wide, tack 

 the strips on frames with fine tacks, about 3-16 of 

 an inch apart. I have been trying it, and I think it 

 will more than pay, as the bees fill the sections 

 much quicker than when the separators are whole. 



Wm. L. King. 



Benton Harbor, Mich., July 10, 1880. 



I know from experience, friend K., that 

 shaking the bees off their combs and letting 

 them run into an empty hive will often cure 

 them of balling a queen, but for all that, I 

 think your success is more owing to acci- 

 dent, than because it has any great advan- 

 tage over the usual and less troublesome 

 way. When you say you have put queens 

 right into hives without any introduction, I 

 think you strike at the root of the matter. 

 A few days ago, as an experiment, I let 7, 

 dollar queens run in at the entrances of 7 

 queenless hives. All but two of them were 

 received and are now doing all right. 

 Among the 5 that accepted these queens was 

 a black colony whose queen had been sold 

 that same day. They paid no attention to 

 her at all, and she went right to laying. Had 

 I adopted some roundabout process, I might 

 have claimed a great discovery. 



HONEY DEW. 



I have read with a good deal of interest, the arti- 

 cles on honey dew, in Gleanings, and now mention 

 a fact which has come under my own observation. 

 We have an orange tree, as it is called, though only 

 about I! feet high. It is kept in the sitting room in 

 the winter. About the middle of last winter, the 

 children called my attention to the fact that the 

 leaves were covered with a sweet substance. It 

 looked as if very sweet water had dried in drops on 

 the leaves, shining as if varnished. Putting the 

 tongue to it dissolved it, and the taste was that of 

 syrup. It continued about 2 days, and then disap- 

 peared. If this was honey dew, I saw no insects to 

 produce It. J. H. Buchanan. 



Huntsville, Logan Co., O., Aug. 4, 1880. 



