270 



THE BEE KEEPERS' REVIEW. 



be as secure against dying before his destiny 

 was wrought to the end as planets are? As 

 I assisted a little at the birth of the Api. I 

 do not see it go under the shades without 

 some feelings of regret. 



Concerning the big and small hive discus- 

 sion Gleanings editorially says on page 513 

 that it is settling down to be a matter of lo- 

 cality. Where surplus honey keeps coming 

 in all summer large hives are likely to prove 

 advantageous; but in most other styles of 

 field ( a majority of the whole number ) the 

 small hive is taking the lead. But " bide a 

 wee "before you accept the whole of even 

 that much as fully assured — might rest too 

 much on orders for hives, and that after all 

 " mought'nt " be the final bed rock. 



Long, coarse, worthless slough grass, cut 

 and dried and fastened to the roof of a hive 

 for a sun shade. This is a " stray straw " — 

 but also the nearer you can come to not hav- 

 ing any stray straw about it the better you 

 will be suited. 



Friend C. Davenport in Gleanings .^IS sails 

 into the prevalent habit of saying that bees 

 will store just as much honey in a nail keg as 

 in the most skillfully devised hive. He is 

 right. The old saw may be true, in one 

 sense, if the box given them is big enough; 

 but the saying is misleading, and may pro- 

 fitably be kicked. Mr. D. (and many 

 others ) have kept box hives and frame hives 

 in considerable numbers side and side for 

 years, and the former do not come near the 

 latter in amount of salable surplus — and 

 that's what we're after. His best box hive 

 record is 80 pounds, while his best frame 

 hive record is 2?tl pounds. Of course we are 

 not now talking about such a mongrel hive 

 as a box with the whole top pried off and 

 sections laid on, but of the out and out box 

 hive with box super, or no super. A big 

 new swarm, when the honey flow is strong, 

 can be made to begin storing surplus almost 

 immediately in a frame hive: but the thing 

 can't be done in the old boxed box. Before 

 they get ready to begin storing the harvest 

 may be over for the year. 



John S. Callbreath in Gleanings 5G1 sug- 

 gests that good weather with hot nights con- 

 duces to swarming, while the same with cool 

 nights abates it. Never thought of it. The 

 idea is worth holding awhile aud testing. 

 His swarm and weather record this season 

 favors the idea. But then we shall not be 

 able to mend the weather, if we find it to 

 blame — Psho ! You wouldn't have a mam- 



moth refrigerator made, now would youV 

 and the apiary on a car to run in every 

 night? 



Pretty much all through the world the 

 discrepancy between figures on paper and 

 the real actualities is startling. An army, 

 on paper is 100,000 men. It charges the en- 

 emie's line with 30,000. Figure on a nice 

 hill of potatoes, and you have twelve hun- 

 dred bushels to the acre. Dig 'em and you 

 have three hundred bushels. I. L. Hyde in 

 Gleanings 585 has just found the same "nig- 

 ger " in the apicultural wood pile; and real- 

 ly he is worth looking at for a moment. If 

 the queen lays 3,000 eggs per day why not 

 3,000 young bees emerging each day? And if 

 this goes on 42 days, before the first of them 

 die of old age, why not 12(5,000 bees in a col- 

 ony? Numbers given in books and journals 

 are none of them as extravagant as 12G,000; 

 but they are often too far in that direction. 

 Friend Hyde got 8 pounds of bees together, 

 from one of his best colonies in swarming 

 time, and guessed that there were a pound 

 more they did not get— total 9 pounds for a 

 first rate colony at the most populous period. 

 Next he shut an exact quarter pound of 

 these bees in a little box and made them 

 march out single file to be counted. There 

 were 747. ( carrying heavy loads of honey, it 

 seems; as a quarter pound of bees with 

 empty sacs would count out 1,125. ) So his 

 colony numbered 2G,892. Here arise two in- 

 teresting questions; What becomes of the 

 rest of the 126,000 the figures call for? and, 

 How much of truth have the books and 

 journals in talking about 40,000 bees and 

 60,000 bees in a colony? As a guess (and I 

 rather like a guessing match ) I guess that 

 occasional fine colonies go a good deal high- 

 er than 27,000. But that don't touch the 

 great mass of fine colonies which presuma- 

 bly, are at maximun just about the size of 

 friend Hyde's. He proposes solution by put- 

 ting a good queen's average, at 1,000 per day; 

 and admitting the 3,000 to 5,000 as genuine, 

 but rare and brief. I suspect that the June 

 averaije is more than a thousand; but that 

 not more than half the eggs laid are hatched, 

 as a general thing. Say, eggs laid 2,000 per 

 day, young bees emerging 1,000 per day, and 

 untimely deaths to average 3.57 per day. 

 This gives a maximum population of 

 27,000— somebody better it. 



Dadant says four frame extractor without 

 the self-reversing toggery, American Bee 

 Journal 357. 



