.574 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Aug. 



be a little late, I tell you this dumb-waiter 

 lias to do considerable business. They are 

 indeed very great helps. If the whole ap- 

 paratus could be made by machinery, so as 

 to be shipped to customers, with the neces- 

 sary castings, weights, cords, etc., it would 

 be, very likely, the cheapest way they could 

 be got up. ^\'e will try to look into the mat- 

 ter a little. In using ours we always have 

 an attendant above and one below. Ours 

 are arranged to work so smoothly we send 

 up and down, milk, eggs, and every thing 

 refiauretl ; l)iit the waiter moves so steadily 

 that nothing is ever slopped or broken by 

 starting or stopping. 



FAILUBE OF THE HONEY CROP. 



MKS. AXTELL WRITES IN REGARD TO HONEY-DEW, 

 FERTILE WORKER.S, SUGAR FEEDING, ETC. 



K. AXTELL aiut T have railed in soeuiing- 

 much of a honey cri-dp this summer, on ac- 

 oount of the ilroug-lit. Bees were in fi'ood 

 condition the first part of .June; and if we 

 could have had one or two more good 

 showers of rain, by the first of June, we probably 

 should have had our usual amount. However, the 

 bees got enoug-h to crowd the brood-nest, so they 

 are provided for. Had our hives only a small 

 brood-nest we should surely have had to feed sugar 

 before our bees could gather freely again. Pas- 

 tures are brown, and almost dried up bare. 



While Mr. Axtell was back on the farm one day 

 this week, near a thrifty osage orange hedge, he 

 heard a humming of bees. He lifted the limbs of 

 the hedge, and peeped in to see what it was that 

 called the bees there. He saw the leaves in places 

 covered with a sweet, sticky substance. It was not 

 over all the leaves, but more in spots. Just above 

 the leaves that had the honey-like substance were 

 thousands, I suppose, of one kind of aphides. They 

 were white; and on shaking the limb they would 

 jump like grasshoppers, unlike any I ever saw be- 

 fore. There was so much white fuzz, or dust, upon 

 them they made the leaves or limbs they clustered 

 on white. 1 do not think there were enough to 

 cause bees to store any in sections, as they seem to 

 have entirely left ott' storing surplus; but they 

 were very lively, flying as if after honey. It seem- 

 ed to me a wise providence to thus in time of 

 drought provide for even the little bee. 



FOUL BROOD, AND SUGGESTIONS REGARDING. 



We sympathize with you in your being so unfor- 

 tunate as to have foul brood in your apiary. As 

 yoar colonies seem to recover, and you appear at 

 times to get rid of it, I can not but think there is 

 somewhere in the vicinity of your bees some care- 

 less beekeeper who has it. Perhaps he may be a 

 farmer with a few hives who does not look after 

 his bees, and occasionally a colony has it so bad 

 that it dies, and leaves the honey; then, of course, 

 the neighboring- bees would come in for their share 

 and thus spread it. It seems to me I would try 

 feeding phenolated syrup, and keep it up for a 

 while— enough to reach a little to all the bees in the 

 neighborhood, if you should have any reason to 

 fear the above dangers mentioned were possible. 



LAYING QUEENS FOR SWARMING TI.ME. 



Making nuclei and rearing young queens before 

 swarming time, so the queens are all ready for use, 

 is a nice thing. It is very easy then to manage an 



apiary, when one has plenty of young queens al- 

 ready in nuclei awaiting swarms. It is entirely an- 

 other thing when one has all the bees he desires, 

 to find his honey harvest suddenly cut oft' with no 

 swarms. It was precisely in this situation that we 

 found ourselves this season. We have accordingly 

 decided that, in future, we shall be very careful 

 about raising queens and dividing up colonies into 

 nuclei, unless we are prettj^ sure to have a honey- 

 harvest. If the spring were quite wet, and the clo- 

 ver abundant, I suppo.se we should be i)retty cer- 

 tain of a honey harvest, which always brings with 

 it more or less swarming. 



This time I do not mind having made so luanj- nu- 

 clei as I would if I had broken up good colonies. As 

 it was, I used onlj- the colonies that had failing and 

 rejected queens; and this leads me to mention that 

 Mr. A.xtell and I much prefer home-bred queens; 

 that is, queens raised in our own apiaries. Queens 

 that have come to us through the mails are invaria- 

 bly short-li\ed, and seldom build up into choice col- 

 onies. We think this is because of the confinement, 

 and perhaps of too much shaking by the |)OStmas- 

 ters. We do, however, appro\ e of getting a queen 

 to raise queens from occasionally. 



In the spring we had several queenless colonies 

 which I purposed to build up strong. Although I 

 gave them young bees I could not get them to start 

 cells like bees that had not been queenless long. I 

 never had tried queenless colonies before; that is, 

 queenless for so long a time as those may have 

 been. Possibly the spring had something to do with 

 it. as it had been ususually dry. 



FERTILE WORKERS. 



We found one colony that had fertile workers in 

 the spring. I gave them a coiBb of brood with ad- 

 hering bees, but the fertile workers went ahead 

 laying all the same; then we gave them a comb of 

 larvtf, eggs, and a queen-cell with adhering bees. 

 This time they destroyed the cell, and the fertile 

 workers still held sway. It being a fair colony, and 

 I had given it brood so much that I disliked to waste 

 the bees, I took them to a hive with a rejected 

 queen, which I meant to replace soon. 1 brushed 

 the bees of the fertile-worker colony all down at a 

 distance in front, so the young bees and the fertile 

 workers would crawl into that hive. The young 

 bees would be received, but the fertile workers were 

 killed, and the old bees that were not fertile work- 

 ers flew back home, and that was the last of the 

 fertile workers in that hive. In a few days I open- 

 ed the hive and found nice cells started upon the 

 combs I had given them. They had a young (jueen 

 in a few days. 



SUGAR FKEDING. 



Mr. Axtell and I think bee-keepers ought, if possi 

 ble, to entirely discard feeding sugar to bees, be- 

 cause of the growing distrust there is in the minds 

 of people about sugared honey. Only a few weeks 

 ago we received a letter from an intelligent Chris- 

 tian man in Chicago, wishing' our word for it that 

 our honey was strictly i)ui e. He wanted to be sure 

 of it before he recommended it to others, as he was 

 expecting to handle our honey this year. We even 

 felt sorry to tell him we used small starters of comb 

 foundation, and sent him a piece about as large as 

 we generally use for a section, as we use only small 

 starters. He wrote as if people thought there was 

 a great deal of adulterated honey. We wrote him 

 as well as we could, telling him we did not think the 

 comb honey ofl;ered on the market was ever manu- 



