SKI'TIOMISKK, 1!)1!) 



a I. K A N T N G S T N REE C U L T U R E 



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AAf so ain.i 

 to r ;i 1 i /. c 

 ;i 11 e w f i- 111 

 liaoji' 514, Auijust 

 Gleaiiiiigs, that 

 tliere are still a 

 few iioo]ile left 

 w ho like to 

 (lii\e around a 

 c-ountryside with 



a horse and carriage. And don 't mind say- 

 ing so. There are others who do it occasion- 

 ally, Mr. Crane, leaving the popular pikes 

 for quiet country roads, and turning down 

 shady lanes that lead they don't know 

 where. And don't much care. Sometimes 

 they may be looking for a new location for 

 bees, and watching for clover and locust 

 and aster; but they don't really need an 

 excuse. 



There are even those — I know at least 

 two of them — who sometimes take along a 

 box of sandwiches and apjile tarts; and 

 wlien the sun, 



" Closing his benediction, 

 Sinks, and the darkeaiing air 

 Thrills with a sense of the triumphing night" — 

 then in the new refreshing coolness, off on 

 some quiet side road, they open the box, 

 finally shaking out the last crumbs into the 

 concealing dusk. The queer thing is, they 

 don 't mind at all, but like it perhaps the 

 more, that it is all so very leisurely and 

 old-fashioned. By contrast it reminds me 

 of the speed demon whom the small boy de- 

 scribed by the assertion, ' ' It takes three 

 folks to see that fellah. One says 'Here he 

 comes!', one says 'Here he is!' and another 

 says 'Yonder lie goes!' An they gotta all 

 three talk at once!" 



That was surely neither a sideliner nor 

 a wise man of any kind. "There was al- 

 ways more in the world than men could see, 

 walked they ever so slowly; they will see it 

 no better for going fast. * * * It does 

 a man no harm to go slow; for his glory is 

 not at all in going, but in being." 

 * -jr * 



"I take it for granted that a beekeeper 

 generally extracts what honey there is above 

 the queen-excluder. No other system is very 

 practical. ' ' — Thus Mr. Holtermann, page 505. 

 That is not, I think, the practice in this 

 section. Most beekeepers here find their 

 brood-chambers at that time, as Mr. Holter- 

 mann says his also are, very short of stores, 

 in fact often with practically none — having 

 them nearly filled with brood. So we leave 

 considerable of the honey above the ex- 

 cluder — that is, when the brood-chamber 

 consists of a single standard body. I think 

 I have heard Mr. Buchanan say he doesn 't 

 touch the body just over the brood-chamber, 

 which, under his system is one body only 

 at the end of the flow, the other one having 

 been raised, usually over an empty super, 

 at the opening of the flow. With such a 

 generous supply left them, the bees are safe, 

 even with only a slight fall flow. If there 

 should be a big fall flow, there can be an- 



Beekeeping as a Side Line 



ILJ 



1 



Grace Allen 



LJ 



,'591 



other extracting. 

 Where the brood- 

 chamber is made 

 lip of a story 

 and a half, and 

 kept at that size 

 thru a honey 

 flow, as many of 

 ours were this 

 summer, we are 

 almost surely safe, in removing all above the 

 excluder; for the little body is apt to be 

 solid honey. 



We ourselves have sometimes taken all 

 the honey above the excluder of a single 

 brood-chamber, I admit; but it has been in 

 the acknowledged sjiirit of the sideliner, 

 who, having only a small yard, can watch 

 each colony individually for stores. Our 

 main flow, clover, fades away from mid- 

 June to July 1, when it is practically at an 

 end. During July, we have usually in this 

 immediate neighborhood that "teasing" 

 sort of flow referred to once by Mrs. De- 

 muth as doing often more harm" than good, 

 wearing out the bees more than it benefits 

 them and faster than the slackened brood- 

 rearing can replace them. Bitterweed 

 doubtless leads among these minor nectar- 

 bearers of this period, with a little smart- 

 weed a little later, and then a real dearth. 

 However, this bitterweed grows, fortunately, 

 in a narrow^ area, following a path scarcely 

 a mile wide along the railroad. It runs 

 along the track as far as Memphis. 



Last month we met the nice friendly wife 

 of a pleasant ex-sideliner, and she spoke to 

 us about as follows: "No, I assuredly do 

 not like bees. I like to see them flying 

 around and I'm willing to share my flowers 

 with them, but I don 't want anything to do 

 with them. A few years ago I tried to take 

 care of the bees while Mr. Sideliner was 

 gone. The bees would crawl all over him 

 and not sting him, so I was willing to try 

 it too. 



"They swarmed a good deal, but I man- 

 aged to handle the swarms somehow — we 

 had a smoker and such things, and I could 

 put the hives down and get the bees into 

 them without much trouble. But after a 

 while it came time to rob them. Well, I 

 understood I ought to do it towards night, 

 so I started late in the day and began to 

 brush the bees off the honey. Before I got 

 thru it was quite dark, and had begun to 

 rain, and the ground was covered all over 

 with bees, thick, crawling all around. And 

 what they did to me! I was literally cover- 

 ed with stings, all over, and it put me to 

 bed for several days. No, I don 't want any- 

 thing more to do with bees. One good 

 thing, tho — you know there 's a good side 

 to everything — I had had rheumatism badly 

 up to that time, and tho that was several 

 years ago, I've never had a bit of rheuma- 

 tism since. ' ' 



Note to Beginners: Don't try to take 

 your honey by the ])rush-off-the-bees-in-the 



