50 



THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW. 



same time, which gives the whole crop oft 

 times the flavor of tobacco stems. Shoot 

 it! Or does it shoot too much itself? A, 

 B. J., 68. 



THE GENERAL ROUND- UP. 



Bone to pick with Ernest for his slur on 

 the Vienna lubricant for making foundation 

 without giving it any bad taste. Gleanings, 

 931. It seems to me that this is one of the 

 most excellent and praiseworthy lines of ef- 

 fort which apiculture afl:ordsto the inventor. 

 If it can be done, let's have a lubricant that 

 will not defile our product. And when the 

 article actually arrives, and hide-bound old 

 fogies won't use it, let's have them drum- 

 med out of town. (Savage this afternoon.) 

 Among the necessary evils that civilization 

 calls for. soap (not necessarily, but as usually 

 made) is one of the vilest. I put it on my 

 hands under protest ; and as for putting it 

 into my mouth, I would almost as lief eat 

 one of A. I. R's onions. I can taste the stuff 

 in the top side of a section of honey when 

 only a little bit of foundation is used ; and 

 my abhorrence of its faint meanness of fla- 

 vor seems to get worse from year to year, in 

 room of my getting used to it. I think that 

 with the general education of the public 

 taste we shall be compelled to do something. 

 The substitute referred to by Dr. Miller was 

 one part extracted honey, two parts of water, 

 and three parts alcohol. If it works well 

 the complaint that it costs a little more than 

 soap ought not to be allowed. 



S. E. Miller, in Gleanings, 935, is right 

 about late extracting ; and with a field that 

 is strong on the latter end of the season, and 

 with a virtuous resolution to have all honey 

 ripe if possible, you are liable to have lots of 

 cold weather extracting to do. Take the 

 honey out at four licks instead of two, rever- 

 sing twice. I do this with an old fashioned 

 extractor; but of course the self-reversing 

 ones would come in with extra labor saving 

 value in this case. 



C. W. Dayton fed 100 pounds of syrup for 

 the purpose of getting foundation drawn 

 out. Then he extracted what he could re- 

 cover of it, and fed it again ; and so on 

 more times, till it had practically disappear- 

 ed. He noticed that the quality of the arti- 

 cle improved with each storing. This is 

 worth jotting down among the " treasures 

 new and old " which we may want some- 

 time, we don't know when or what for. 

 Gleanings, 939. 



The same article of Brother Dayton's 

 furnishes us with another point a-la-Califor- 

 nia. Swarming out takes place there when 

 neither famine, nor winter ills, nor any oth- 

 er well recognized cause is present. Just get 

 so miserably impatient waiting for some- 

 thing to turn up that they pack and go. He 

 notes that the better queen a colony has the 

 more likely they are to leave. This, if cor- 

 rect, bears on the whys and wherefores of 

 swarming. And we greatly want to know 

 these whys and wherefores, in order that the 

 effective control of swarming may be estab- 

 lished. This item points decidely to the 

 queen as a very strong factor. She greatly 

 desires brood rearing to go on lively ; and 

 the workers know it won't do when they can 

 find neither nectar nor pollen for the babies. 

 The outcome is that they swarm, apparently 

 in response to the queen's discontent. And 

 it begins to look as if prime swarms came 

 out in response to the queen's discontent — 

 discontent at not being allowed to destroy 

 the queen cells. But when they swarm with 

 a queen only two days released from limbo, 

 as related a bit ago, that must be adherence 

 to a previous resolution, one would say. 



J. J. Cosby makes the point in favor of 

 the ten-frame hive that in a long bad season, 

 with a honey harvest very late, the store of 

 food carried in the two outside frames had 

 enabled the bees to meet the work with fair 

 working strength ; while eight-frame hives 

 side and side with them were too weak to get 

 the crop as the others did. Result, 9 pounds 

 per colony for the eight-frames, and iK) 

 pounds per colony for the ten-framers. 

 Gleanings, 947. 



H. Dupret, of Montreal, cleans his hands 

 of propolis with pumice stone and water. 

 Gleanings, 9r.l. Not bad perhaps— unless 

 your hand happens to be a " tenderfoot." 



Friend Aikin (why, we'd almost lost him) 

 has been testing the comparative strength of 

 foundation lengthwise and crosswise. Deci- 

 dedly the strongest lengthwise— just as bar 

 iron is stronger lengthwise than crosswise. 

 The reason is assumed to be the same in 

 both. The material is first in the state of 

 semi-crystals, and rolling extends them into 

 inchoate wires, which can be parted from 

 each other laterally much easier than they 

 can be snapped lengthwise. This is a point- 

 er as to the preferable way to hang founda- 

 tion in the hive. Gleanings, 9.50. 



Richards, J.ucas Co., Ohio, Feb. 7, '9.5. 



