1889 



CLEANINGS IN BEE CULTUKE. 



805 



think each careful bee-keeper will find that 

 it will pay him to do so. It certainly does 

 not pay to leave things at loose ends. Hon- 

 ey is frequently sent us, without the ship- 

 per knowing either the gross or tare, trust- 

 ing all to our honesty. I do not like this 

 way of doing. A great many times we do 

 not care to empty packages of extracted 

 honey, and the weight of the barrel or keg 

 is taken from the shipper, and accepted 

 right along, until it comes to be retailed 

 out. — Years ago I discovered that, during 

 very warm weather, queens, when nearly 

 ready to hatch, won Id mature just as well 

 out of the cell as in ; and I, too, have tum- 

 bled them out of the cell into my hand, and 

 put them back again, and had them make 

 nice queens. With the lamp nursery I have 

 had them develop with no cell at ail ; but I 

 never succeeded with one until it was so 

 near hatching that the legs and wings were 

 pretty fully developed. 



ZINC HONEY-BOARDS. 



THE VARIOUS USES OF THE METAL IN BEEKEEPING. 



fHE invention of the queen-excluding- honey- 

 board marks an era in bee-keeping-. Popular 

 and useful as these have proved before, we 

 are just learning some of their most impor- 

 tant uses, and their possibilities are probably 

 by no means exhausted. 



By their use the queen is, kept out of the supers, 

 which is of the greatest advantage in extracting-. 

 In comb-honey production they are not so necessary, 

 though even here they are very useful, and in some 

 cases indispensable. In dividing, forming- nuclei, 

 and selling- bees by the pound, it is a great advan- 

 tage to be able to take bees from a hive without the 

 necessity of buntiDg up the queen. Queen and 

 drone traps serve a very useful purpose in prevent- 

 ing the loss of swarms and the flight of undesirable 

 drones, though on account of their expense and 

 some other objections they are not in very general 

 use. 



A queen-excluding honey-board at the bottom of 

 the hive is much superior for temporary use. To 

 adapt it to continued use, some way of disposing of 

 the drones is necessary. Who will invent an attach- 

 ment that will lead the drones into a chamber by 

 themselves, from which they can readily be re- 

 moved, and which will not make it necessary to cut 

 holes in the hive or bottom-board, and will leave 

 the queen-excluding board uninjured for its ordi- 

 nary use? 



Perhaps this is too much to expect, and we shall 

 probably have to combine the drone-trap with the 

 honey-board. Friend Heddon seems to have faith 

 in an attachment to the side of the hive, but has not 

 made the details public. I know that a hole bored 

 through the side of the hive, covered with a small 

 box having a hole covered with a wire-cloth cone on 

 one side, and queen-excluding zinc on the other, 

 answers very well, but I do not like to bore holes in 

 my hives or make a drone-trap a permanent feature 

 in all of them. 



RAISING QUEENS ABOVE PERFORATED METAL,. 



A great deal of experimenting has no doubt been 

 done this season with the new methods of having 

 queen-cells built and queens fertilized above per- 

 forated metal. So far as my experience goes, it is 



easy to get cells built while there is a queen in full 

 vigor below, though these cells are by no means of 

 the first quality, except under favorable conditions. 

 1 have had no suceess in getting queens fertilized 

 in this way, though I have no doubt that, during the 

 proper season, it would work well. Steady feeding 

 when honey is not coming in freely will probably be 

 necessary to insure success with either plan. 



I have had some little trouble this season from the 

 queen going through the perforated metal. This 

 was a lot bought of you two years ago. It seemed 

 as though any queen could go through it whenever 

 she really wanted to; and any strong inducement, 

 suoh as frames of brood, would be almost certain to 

 bring her through, and I have known queens to go 

 back and forth through it every three or four days. 

 This same zinc, though, almost invariably kept 

 queens out of extracting supers. 



I have known some to argue that there was not 

 enough passageway through the break-joint queen- 

 excluding board. Let us see. If 1 have measured 

 rightly, each perforation has an area of £J of an 

 inch. The combined area, then, of the holes in a 

 break-joint queen-excluder for an eight-frame hive 

 would be 21.06 sq. in., equal to 27 holes an inch in 

 diameter. The all-zinc break-joint boards for eight- 

 frame hives have, as the combined area of their 

 perforations, 36.85 sq. in., equal to 47 one-inch holes. 

 Of course, some of this area is in corners, and not 

 available for passage; but allowing for this, there is 

 much more passageway than used to be considered 

 abundant with the old-style honey-boards and boxes. 



PLAIN SHEETS OF PERFORATED ZINC IN THE BROOD- 

 NEST NOT RECOMMENDED. 



The plan of laying a plain sheet of perforated zinc 

 directly on top of the frames does not work well, as 

 usually but a small proportion of the boles is left 

 available for passage. All-zinc honey-boards are 

 not well adapted to use on new hives, as they will 

 sag by their own weight, no matter how straight 

 they may be at first, nor how well nailed to the 

 wood binding. When used on old hives, though, 

 where the zinc is supported in the center by brace- 

 combs, they answer excellently. For the same 

 reason, these boards, when made up, should not be 

 piled up flat, but should be stood on edge. It seems 

 strange that a metal, apparently as firm as zinc is, 

 should thus stretch and sag, but it is a fact. 



Dayton, 111., Aug. 29, 1889. J. A. Green. 



THIS SEASON'S OBSERVATIONS. 



THE WEATHER, ETC. 



fS^ HIS year was a favorable one for bees. Oold- 

 ^ en willow began blooming April 15th, and in 

 i a few days the hives were all well filled. We 

 had but little rain from November till the 

 middle of May; consequently the spring was 

 extremely dry. But for all that, bees made a good 

 living through fruit-bloom and buckeye. Locust 

 opened up with fine prospects, but it then began 

 raining, and rained for four weeks. Poplar bloom- 

 ed profusely at this time, but the weather was too 

 rainy for the bees to do much. Finally it cleared 

 up, and white clover began blooming, though much 

 later than usual, on account of the early drought. 

 Then the bees began to swarm, and kept swarming 

 untilJuly 4. We increased from 20 to 40, doubling 

 up many of the new swarms. Basswood produced 

 but little honey. White and sweet clovers did well. 



