(Entered as aecond-elass matter July 30, 1907. at the Post-Offlce at Chicago, 111., under Act of March 3, 1879.) 



Published Monthly at $1.00 a Year, by George W. York & Company, 146 West Superior Street, 



GEORGE \V. YORK. Editor. 



DR. C, C. MILLER, .•\ssociate Editor. 



CHICAGO, ILL., FEBRUARY, 1910 



Vol. L--No. 2 



Cditbriaf ^ofes 

 and Comments 



Overstockingr and Inirlugiiig- 



G. M. Doolittle having commended a 

 man as conscientious who "would not 

 think of locating in a territory already 

 occupied by somebody else," Morley 

 Pettit, in Gleanings, thinks the man is 

 wise, rather than conscientious. He 

 says: "The act of overstocking is a 

 boomerang. Unlike mercy, it curses 

 him who gives and him who takes." Of 

 course the idea is that the man who in- 

 fringes on the territory of another so 

 as to cause overstocking has thrown a 

 a boomereng that will recoil upon him- 

 self. Editor Root footnotes the article 

 by saying : 



There can be no question but that, when 

 a man brings a lot of bees into a locality that 

 is already well stocked, he is working 

 against his own interests. But the question 

 is, "How are we going to educate him so 

 that he will be ' wise ' enough not to locate 

 there in the first place?" Mr. Pettit has 

 presented a phase of the question that has 

 not been receiving the attention it should. 



Now, who has the answer to the 

 question as to how a man is to be edu- 

 cated to look out for his own interests? 

 Very likely, Mr. Root, there are some 

 who will suggest that in some cases 

 where men can not be educated to be- 

 come "wise" to their own interests, 

 other steps are taken. The man who 

 is "wise" will never steal, nor drink 

 whiskey, but no system of education 

 has yet been discovered so effectual 

 but that there are still thieves and 

 drunkards. But laws against stealing, 

 with penalties attached, are supposed 

 to be necessary for those who will not 

 otherwise become " wise," and there 

 are among bee-keepers some who are 

 cranky enough to suppose that there 

 ought to be laws to compel a man to 

 be " wise " in the matter of infringing 

 on another man's territorv. 



Advantage ot Bulk Comb Honey 



Among the advantages claimed for 

 bulk honey by J. J. Wilder, in Glean- 

 ings, is this : 



In the production of bulk comb honey all 

 the surplus honey can be removed at the 

 end of each flow, whether the frames are full 

 or not, and the honey is as nice, for it can 

 be saved and will bring its full market value. 



The idea probably is that the honey 

 may be extracted from the partly filled 

 combs at the end of any particular flow, 

 the combs to be used again in the next 

 flow. 



Variation in Basswood Bloom 



That close observer, G. M. Doolittle. 

 reports in Gleanings, that in his vicinity 

 the very earliest blooming tree opened 

 its buds last year July 12. Then other 

 trees came into bloom on successive 

 days until July 24, on which date the 

 very latest opened its first bloom. Thus 

 there was a variation of 12 days be- 

 tween the earliest and the latest bloom- 

 er. That would make it seem that the 

 basswood harvest should be in any 

 year more than 12 days in duration. 

 But there are years of failure, when 

 there is no basswood harvest ; and it 

 is not impossible that in other years 

 the failure may affect all but the earliest 

 or latest, thus cutting down the time of 

 yield to less than 12 days. Possibly, 

 too, in other localities the variation 

 between earliest and latest may be 

 greater or less than at Borodino, N. Y. 



Flour Plan of Queen-Production 



In England the plan of uniting colo- 

 nies by sprinkling the bees with flour 

 is quite in favor, although for some 

 reason it has not been used much in 



this country. But Elmer J. Weaver re- 

 ports, in Gleanings, that he has been 

 using it successfully in introducing 

 queens. He says : 



The method I employed with success was 

 to remove the old queen, place the frames 

 back in the hive, and dust several small 

 handfuls of flour over the tops of the frames 

 in such a manner that the flour got well 

 mixed with the bees between the frames. 

 The queen was then coated thoroughly with 

 flour and run down between the combs, fol- 

 lowed by a good sprinkling of flour. 



This plan was not entirely successful 

 when practiced with queens received 

 through the mails, so was modified in the 

 following manner: After removing the old 

 queen, the bees were shaken from the 

 combs into the bottom of a hive, dusted 

 thoroughly with flour, and the queen coated 

 with flour was dropped among them. The 

 frames were then replaced carefully, and 

 the hive not opened again for a few days. 



In the same paper, Mel Pritchard, an 

 experienced queen-rearer, thus reports 

 his success with flour in introducing 

 virgins : 



.\t one time last summer I had quite a sur- 

 plus of virgin qeens that were about six days 

 old; and. wishing to introduce them as 

 quickly as possible, I decided to try the flour 

 method. I took the virgins, one at a time, 

 and threw them into a tin baking-powder can 

 half full of flour, and shut them in. As six- 

 day old virgins are very active they tried to 

 fly around in the box. and in less than one 

 minute they were so completely covered 

 with flour that they could not fly at all. 

 While in this condition I picked them up on 

 the end of a small twig and ran them in at 

 the entrance of the nucleus-boxes. Forty 

 virgins were thus treated, and about 75 per- 

 cent of them were successfully introduced. 

 At the same time, three laying queens were 

 successfully introduced to full colonies by 

 the same plan. 



How Much Honev Does a Bee 

 Oather? 



In Gleanings, G. M. Doolittle makes 

 an estimate of what a bee can do in the 

 way of gathering in its lifetime, setting 

 it at an ounce of nectar, or 'j ounce 

 of honey, with conditions most favor- 

 able for gathering. A Stray Straw in 

 the same periodical, on the supposition 

 that a colony with a field-force of 30,- 

 000 workers each day for 26 consecutive 

 days (26 days being the field-life of a 

 worker) gathers 15 pounds of honey, 

 including the amount stored and the 

 amount consumed by the colony, fig- 

 ures that a bee during that time may 

 store one-fifth of an ounce of honey. 



What a bee can do under the most 

 favorable circumstance^ is quite a dif- 

 ferent thing from what the average bee 



