E 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



1 



EDITORIAL 



ONE OF OUE SUBSCEIBERS, W. J. Har- 

 vey of Upalco, Utah, reports for last year 

 the following re- 

 Prize to be markable record: 

 Given for the ' ' Last year I ob- 

 Best Record. tained 908 lbs. of 

 surplus from one 

 colony, and would like to learn how near this 

 comes to being the world 's record. I have 

 plenty of sweet clover and about 100 days of 

 honey flow. A yield of 171 lbs. in ten days 

 was the best for that period. The only special 

 attention this hive had was to be extracted 

 from every ten days; or, when extracting 

 was not possible, I gave plenty of storage 

 room. It always took three supers to hold the 

 bees, with one to two inches of air above 

 the top super. With 40 hives, and ' two 

 increase, ' I got 240 five-gallon cans of 

 honey. As this good hive made 15 cans, 

 you can see that there were only three cans 

 more than twice the average, and that is 

 nothing unusual, according to what I read. 

 There was only one queen, and no bees nor 

 brood given to this hive during the season. 

 I fed outdoors from early spring till the 

 honey flow, and from frost to freeze. I 

 also fed ' natural dry powder ' — pollen mix- 

 ed about 1/4 to % flour." 



Can any of our readers beat this? If 

 every one could do as well as this in the 

 bee business, many of them, at least, would 

 give up their banks and their gold mines. 

 But not every one is able to do it. If any 

 one can break this record of 908 pounds sur- 

 plus from one colony, either in the United 

 States or Canada, let him hold up his hand 

 and we will publish the record. 



Gleanings has decided that it will send a 

 $20 breeding queen to the man in the United 

 States or Canada who can prove the highest 

 record for one colony during 1919, giving 

 names of supporting witnesses if required. 



:M^CB= 



IN TALKING WITH a producer of comb 

 honey in Nevada, who operates 3,000 colo- 

 nies, and produces 

 Short Cuts in several carloads of 



Comb-honey comb honey each 



Production, season, we learned 



several valuable 

 hints which may save work for other pro- 

 ducers. Perhaps some of his ideas may not 

 be as successful under different conditions. 

 He operates a large ranch for alfalfa hay 



and seed, and, incidentally, gets 800 pounds 

 of alfalfa seed per acre, while a ranch ten 

 miles away, without bees, produces only 

 250 i)ounds of seed. 



He prepares his supers some time in ad- 

 vance, ready to place on the hives when the 

 honey flow begins. They must be trucked 

 some distance. He always uses a bottom 

 starter. For the top starter he finds the 

 best results in straight even combs come 

 from using a V-shaped starter. Other forms 

 under his conditions are inclined to curl, 

 resulting in irregular combs. When the sec- 

 tions are in the super, he paints their top sur- 

 face with hot paraffin. This excludes all mois- 

 ture, travel-stain, or propolis; and the work 

 of scraping is only a small fraction of what 

 it is without this protection. If the scrap- 

 ing is done in a cool temperature the film 

 of jjaraffin comes off easily, carrying with it 

 all stains or propolis. Should the supers 

 remain unused or unfinished till another sea- 

 son, the paraffin protects the sections from 

 dampness, mildew, and discoloration. 



Mr. Warren visits his bees three times 

 each season. In April he goes thru, divid- 

 ing and equalizing, making approximately 

 three colonies from one. At the opening of 

 the honey flow in July he unites three hives 

 into one, piling the supers on six or eight 

 high, letting the queens fight it out. He 

 returns in the fall and takes off the honey. 

 By this plan he has three queens building- 

 up a working force during the breeding- 

 season; and also has a big working force 

 during the honey flow but with reduced 

 breeding at that time — all this with a mini- 

 mum of labor. 



THE SHORTAGE OF SUGAR was not the 



sole cause of the high price of honey during 



the war. People 



The Price of have been gradual- 



^ Honey ly learning to use 



Looks Up. more and more hon- 



ey, and a steadily 

 increasing number of families are coming to 

 1 ogard it as a necessary article of diet. 

 They have come to recognize it as nature's 

 concentrated sweet, a form of carbohydrate 

 that is easily assimilated by the human sys- 

 tem. Many of the half million people in 

 this country alone, suffering from diabetes, 

 as a result of eating too much common sugar 

 or candy, have learned that, if substituted 



