1889 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Gin 



could be by sugar feeding, when no stores 

 were to be had. If one commences in the 

 fore part of June with any sort of a nucleus 

 having a laying queen it can be built up 

 strong very speedily. We presume you did 

 not get any brood from other colonies ; but 

 we infer that you took queens or queen- 

 cells. You also purchased LS or 20 queens ; 

 but as all the nuclei died to which these 

 were given, it is perhaps fair to make no ac- 

 count of it. The fact that you did winter 

 through 45, all made from this original colo- 

 ny June 7, is astonishing. I once increased 

 11 colonies to over 50, and wintered them 

 all ; and I did it much on the plan you have 

 mentioned. I suppose you did not keep any 

 account of your time. If you could tell us 

 just how many days' work it took to do this 

 we could tell better whether it is a paying 

 business. My impression is, that it will pay 

 handsomely whenever bees can be sold, say 

 for $5.00 a colony. We used to have a good 

 deal of sport in hunting wild bees, and 

 bringing them home ; but after I learned 

 how to make colonies by increase, in the 

 way you have outlined, I decided that I 

 could build up colonies a good deal cheaper 

 than to take them out of trees in the woods. 



QUEEN - EXCLUDING HONEY-BOARDS. 



BEE-JOURNALS, AND ARE THEY GUILTY OF PUFF- 

 ING UP THINGS TOO MUCH? 



honey-boards. Ho will probably report his success 

 with it. Mclntyre and myself are the only bee- 

 keepers in this county who have ever used a honey- 

 board of any kind, I think. He has used probably 

 not more than one or two. 1 have used over 200 

 Heddon slat honey-hoards for the last three or four 

 years, but 1 think I will make them all queen- 

 excluding next season, for we have several thou- 

 sand drone combs that we want to keep the queens 

 out of. Can you tell me where I can get a machine 

 to make the strips of zinc, with two rows of perfo- 

 rations in them? There are many bee-keepers here 

 who count their hives by the hundred, who don't 

 know what a queen-excluder is. 



The honey crop in California is very short this 

 year. 1 think it is less than a quarter of a crop. I 

 have a list, nearly complete, of all the bee-keepers 

 in the county, of the number of colonies each one 

 owns, and the number of tons of honey produced 

 by each. I will send you a report when complete, if 

 you wish it. 



8N page 441 of Gleanings I notice an article 

 from the pen of my neighbor, J. F. Mcln- 

 tyre. Said article is headed, " A Big Testi- 

 monial in Favor of Perforated Zinc." Well, 

 that big testimonial brought back to my 

 mind what a friend of mine said to me on the Ojai 

 about six years ago, when I asked him why he did 

 not take a bee-paper, he being quite an extensive 

 bee-keeper. He said he used to take several East- 

 ern bee-papers, but he got tired of reading fine- 

 spun articles and big reports from men that kept 

 five or six hives of bees to experiment with. Well, 

 I think that was a pretty big hurrah for one honey- 

 board. If it had been 50 or 100, then I should have 

 said hurrah too. I have used the zinc honey-boards 

 again this season that we used last (see page 358), 

 with a little better result than last season. This 

 year four out of eight let the queens go through 

 about as well or as easily as the workers. One of 

 them we saw the queen go down through with per- 

 fect ease (this queen was a good-sized Italian); but, 

 as you say, those zincs may have been made on 

 your old machine that was somewhat worn. One 

 of them was about half full of drones, hung by the 

 neck, their bodies dangling down from the under 

 side of the zinc. The other four worked entirely 

 satisfactorily; and if I can get a queen-excluder 

 that is a queen-excluder, I will use over one thou- 

 sand of them next season. 



I was at friend Mclntyre's a few weeks ago, and 

 saw, while there, one of Dr. Tinker's honey-boards. 

 It appeared to me that the bees can get through it 

 much easier than they can through the all-zinc 

 ones, as the strips of zinc have two rows of holes 

 in them; thus each row is close to the wood slats; 

 and I notice the bees can pull themselves up 

 through the perforations by catching hold of the 

 wood slats. 1 gave Mr. Intyre one of my zinc 



You can see by the record which I send you, of a 

 hive that I had on scales this season, that the hon- 

 ey came in very slowly. It does not look very big 

 for California, I assure you; but it will partly ex- 

 plain to you how myself and my four boys did all 

 the work of extracting and taking care of over 1100 

 hives of bees. Myself and the three youngest boys 

 extracted in 13 hours 3!4 tons of honey, and we did 

 not play much of the time either. Such rapid work 

 is in a great measure due to the very convenient 

 extracting-house that we have, a description of 

 w'lich I may give you in the future. 



FOUL BROOD. 



This is getting to be very scarce in this county. 

 I commenced experimenting about the time that 

 you were here last winter, with a very simple reme- 

 dy for the cure of foul brood. I take two or three 

 spoonfuls of sulphur, put it in an old fruit-can, and 

 pour over it enough kerosene Oil to make a thin 

 paint of it. Apply it with a small paint-brush to 

 the combs that have the diseased cells in them; 

 brush them all over with the sulphur and oil. It 

 will kill some of the healthy brood, but not all of 

 it; also brush it over the frames and as much of the 

 hive as you can without getting it on the bees. 

 One or two applications have cured six or eight for 

 me this season, or at least they are perfectly 

 healthy now, and some of them were very bad. 



Several combs were nearly half diseased. If the 

 disease does not appear again in those same colo- 

 nies by next spring, I will shout " Eureka! " Now, 

 friend Root, don't say that you smell brown coffee 

 or chilled brood, or something else worse. 



L. E. Mercer, 



SanJBuena Ventura, Cal., July t>, 1889. 



