THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW. 



211 



hoys, I fear, would liave laid them hetore us 

 in serene obliviousness of the circuinstante 

 that they do not prove when added up by 

 nearly 20,0(K),0(K) pounds Kkview, l(i7. 



I was •' aiuaziu " stirred up to see how 

 many chances there are to net wrong in so 

 simple a matter as brushing bees with a sin- 

 gle great big feather. Must he from the 

 left wing of the bird for Yankee use, and 

 from the right wing if you're a left handed 

 German. I should have put the concave 

 aide ahead — and authority says convex side 

 ahead. I should have gone for 'em with the 

 wide side of the feather — and authority says 

 narrow side. All this only shows again , 

 what was found out long ago, that man 

 never gets the right way till he has done all 

 the wrong ways first. Review, 1()7. 



'■ Hives well shaded will liavo plenty of stores 

 wliil^ those in the sun will be stfirvint;." Cuba; 

 \V. W. Sonierford ; (lleaninss, ;nO. 



Have to work so hard at fanning, I sup- 

 pose, that they eat their stores up ; wliile tlie 

 shaded ones are quiescent and not on fnll 

 rations. Very likely this needs looking to 

 much further north than Cuba. 



Raising greenhouse peaches in November 

 in Oregon. Something had to be done or 

 the flowers wouldn't fertilize. Swishing the 

 l)lossoms with a spray of warm water worked 

 [loorly. PoUenizing by hand with a little 

 brush worked. Operator thought Jie worked, 

 and rather too much. Hive of bees " took 

 the cake " — in fact overdid the job so great- 

 ly that the young peaches had to be thinned 

 by hand. Gleanings, 392. 



" Some twenty years ago I noticed that queens 

 reared to superwede a failing queen were less in- 

 clined t o swarm than those reared during tlio 

 height of swarming." Doolittle in (ileanings, 

 361. 



As this is on the track of our most impor- 

 tent problem suppose we drum our thinking 

 bulbs a little over it. May be simply because 

 they are jioorer queens. Quite a lot of the 

 lirethren, I believe, have i)ronounced such 

 queens inferior. If a queen's laying capaci- 

 ty is only two-thirds of the normal I should 

 not expect the colony to swarm. Then again 

 it may be that colonies which supersede 

 their queens in such times and ways that we 

 notice it, do so because they are somewhat 

 disinclined to swarm instead of omitting 

 the swarming because they have supersedure 

 queens. Most colonies get rid of their old 

 queens during the hurly burly of swarming 

 itself, if I am right. 



Wax candles thirteen feet long and nine 

 teen inches thick, is the way the Moslems 



boom their beeswax market. Gleanings, I'.V. 



That is a suggestive thought on wintering 

 wliich Dr. Miller brings out in Gleu)ti^igs, 

 :?r)2. When the air in our living rooms is 

 very impure from lack of ventilation we 

 shiver at 70° ; but when the air is perfectly 

 pure and crisp we feel warm at (;.5 . This is 

 vere probably one reason why zero harms 

 out door bees less than 'A'J' harms cellar bees. 



J. A. Nash, Gleani)ujs, ;54!(, wants us to be- 

 lieve that he has swarms weighing 28 pounds 

 — and looks down on 14 pound swarms as 

 one hofp'i affairs. 'I'his reviewer promptly 

 directs him to retail that to the bee-keeping 

 marines along the coast of southern (Cal- 

 ifornia. 



Boardman's entrance feeder as shown in 

 Gleanings, 84G, seems an excellent imple- 

 ment — likely to be one of the quite small 

 number of standard feeders of the future. 

 Wooden robber-bars that stick far into the 

 hive are what does it. But then some of the 

 bee-keepers of the future will lind that they 

 use a feeder so seldom that they can afford 

 to "cheese it," and not have such a thing as 

 a feeder around the ranch anywhere. 



Hauling home a couple of loads of bees a 

 few days too late, at Dr. Miller's place last 

 fall, seems to have caused some thirty deaths 

 among them. Just such bees, from the 

 same apiary, and put in the same cellar, 

 only hauled sooner, got through in fair or- 

 der. Must look a little out about late haul- 

 ing. Gleanings, oIK!. 



Beeswax it seems dissolves in boiling alco- 

 hol, but very little stays dissolved when the 

 alcohol is cold. Gleanings, .'?ItS. For this 

 and lots of other things we are indebted to 

 friend Mathey's able treatment of the sub- 

 ject. The very great number of local qual- ' 

 ities, colors and odors of beeswax seems a 

 decided suggestion that beeswax cannot be 

 rvholly a simple secretion from simple hon- 

 ey, nectar or sugar. Something else from 

 local plants, or local something, is to be 

 looked for a little. And in this connection 

 we should remember how hard it is to get 

 bees to produce wax at all out of season. 

 Per contra wejmay remember that there are a 

 good many different flavors of butter, and 

 butter is a secretion — and when wo were boys 

 and had to churn we were aware that it 

 sometimes wouldn't come. 



Cowan's statistics of honey and wax in 

 Britain are very praiseworthy in being so 

 temperate. W^hen we Yankees attempt bee 

 statistics we mostly get crazy as loons. ( )ur 



