B44 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Aug. 



NOTES OF TRAVEL. 



A. I. Boot Among the Bee-Men of Illinois and 

 Wisconsin. 



WHAT HE SAW ANI> WHAT HE [.KAI1NED. 



,T is now 15 minutes of train time, on the 

 afternoon of July 11, and myself and 

 «. Blue Eyes are all ready for a trip. Mrs. 

 x Root decided that she could not go this 

 time. My first point is Chicago, and 

 thence to Dr. C. C. Miller's, Marengo, 111. 

 More anon. 



July 11.— At Elyria we found the train 

 two hours late, and so we found our way in- 

 to a meeting of the Salvation Army. I felt 

 that the sphit of Christ Jesus was there, in 

 spite of their queer methods. The leader 

 was a woman of middle age, evidently a 

 hard-working woman ; but the earnestness 

 and zeal with which she prayed was hard to 

 be resisted. The audience was few and 

 scattering, but the melody of their simple 

 hymns still lingers in my ear, and, I trust, 

 in my heart also. 



July 12. — This morning we saw the sun 

 rise on the great grain-fields of the West— 

 the wide acres where bread for the world is 

 grown. How beautiful are the harvest- 

 fields with their modern machinery ! The 

 village gardens, many of them, look shabby 

 compared with neat, clean, orderly grain- 

 fields. 



July 13. — I have been getting an appetite 

 for breakfast by helping friend Miller hoe 

 out one of his little gardens of roses. You 

 see, I am here a week before I expected to 

 come, and so their plans of having the roses 

 (and bees too) all in apple-pie order were 

 rather upset. When I arrived the doctor 

 was at the Wilson apiary ; but his good wife 

 sent me over, and I begged to go out among 

 the bees and take them by surprise. The 

 bees were making such a roaring, and the 

 doctor's long hat came down over his face 

 so much, I easily got up right by his side, 

 unperceived. The hat is the one on the ta- 

 ble in the picture (see Gleanings for 1887, 

 p. 249). I watched him make his examina- 

 tion, but said nothing. Finally he very lei- 

 surely straightened himself up, but even 

 then did not see me until he became con- 

 scious of a shadow near by; then he grad- 

 ually tipped back his head until he could 

 look over the apparition that had so noise- 

 lessly come close to him. For a brief second 

 he seemed "sort o' dazed," and stared with 

 open mouth in a way that seemed to say, 

 " Well, who are you, and what do you want, 

 and how came you here, any way'? 1 ' until I 

 really began to fear he wasn't going to be 

 glad to see me; and then what a laugh we 

 did have ! Miss Emma was but a few feet 

 away ; but the roar of the bees, and the fas- 

 cination of finding T supers with section 

 after section filled and capped over with 

 snowy-white cappings, held her spellbound 

 until I went up and startled her too, by tell- 

 ing her I wanted to see the lady who is not 

 ordinarily very much "stuck up."' 



Well, Dr. Miller has propolis enough in 

 liis apiaries so there is quite a chance to get 

 stuck up, and therefore both of them were 



clad accordingly. They didn't expect me 

 for a week, and they were just " going for " 

 the bees, in order to get the work ahead be- 

 fore I came. Some fire had dropped out of 

 one of the cold-blast smokers, and burned a 

 great hole in Emma's dress, and— then we 

 all had another big laugh. She was just un- 

 der one of her father's own apple-trees, close 

 by her own home; and if she wasn't rigged 

 to receive company, it was my fault and not 

 hers. Had I knocked at the front door, and 

 then sat in the parlor while she went in the 

 back way and took half an hour to fix up — 

 but I didn't, and I didn"t feel bad about it 

 either. 



I just got one of the smokers and helped 

 "make honey." I do wish the publishers 

 of the cyclopedias could be with us so as to 

 tell accurately just how honey is made. Dr. 

 Miller controls swarming by caging the 

 queen just before swarming time, and keep- 

 ing her caged ten days. All queen-cells are 

 carefully destroyed when the queen is caged, 

 and when she is let out the bees are shaken 

 from the combs, and a most thorough exam- 

 ination is again made for queen-cells. It 

 is some work, but it does the business. As 

 fast as the sections are capped, or nearly all 

 capped, the T supers are stacked up over 

 one of the hives until we get time to carry 

 them away. As fast as one full T super is 

 removed, an empty one takes its place. I 

 tell you, the honey is coming in lively, and 

 we are having fun for sure. 



TAKING HONEY FROM TIIE IIIVES. 



Dr. Miller handles T supers only, and no 

 sections are ever pushed out or sorted out in 

 the apiary. When a T super has all the 

 sections nicely capped but one or two, it is 

 removed from the hive. They do not stop, 

 however, to get all the bees out, but just 

 drive most of them out with the smoker, 

 and then they are laid up in tall piles over 

 some hive of bees that stands in a conveni- 

 ent place. Here they are left until ready to 

 be loaded up. Then one person stands on 

 a hive or box, so as to hold a smoker easily 

 over the pile, and drives the bees down, 

 while another lifts them off. By this means 

 the youug bees left in the supers are all 

 driven down in the hive under the pile, and 

 none are lost. The old ones fiy to their own 

 hives if they want to. When all are hauled 

 home, the sections are removed all at once, 

 as we have already described — see page 249, 

 1887 — and the unfinished ones are put in a 

 super, to be put on some hive again. 



I have before spoken of the doctor's plan 

 of preventing swarming. Well, there is a 

 sequel to this "matter of caging queens for 10 

 days. When Dr. Miller told me the bees 

 would start queen-cells where a queen is 

 caged and laid between the top-bars, almost 

 as soon as if the queen were removed en- 

 tirely, I was incredulous. Years ago I 

 found so many times that bees would not 

 rear queen-ceils when they had a caged 

 queen in the hive, 1 had set it down as a 

 settled fact ; but right before us were hives 

 by the hundred where the queens had been 

 caged about ten days previously, and I was 

 invited to look them over, and see whether 

 there were queen-cells or not. I had to give 

 up. In thinking the matter over afterward, 



