1908 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



23 



HONEY FROM BASSWOOD. 



"I am sending you a few questions which 

 I wish you to answer as they are numbered, 

 if you will accommodate me thus; and 1 

 wish them answered through the columns of 

 Gleanings. 1. lam thinking of moving my 

 bees, the coming summer, several miles to 

 where there is an abundance of basswood, 

 hoping to secure a greater yield of honey 

 than I at present receive, as I have no bass- 

 wood near me. What would be your opin- 

 ion regarding this matter? 2. Are there any 

 seasons when basswood blossoms in profu- 

 sion without giving a good yield of nectar 

 from those blossoms? 3. Are not the blos- 

 som-buds formed on the basswood-trees a 

 few weeks previous to the time of their open- 

 ing, so that I can know by this whether there 

 is a prospect of honey from that source in 

 time to make preparations for moving? 

 Thanking you in advance for whatever re- 

 ply you may see fit to make, I am 



" Yours truly, 

 "T. E. Howe, New York." 



In answering the first question I would say 

 that 1 believe basswood to be the greatest 

 honey-producer in the world, and the least 

 likely to fail to yield nectar of any plant or 

 tree; therefore 1 call the idea of our corres- 

 pondent a good one, and I see nothing against 

 it except the expense. That basswood is an 

 enormous yielder of nectar was proven years 

 ago, when the late Dr. Gallup, then of Or- 

 chard, Iowa, obtained a yield of 20 pounds 

 per day on an average from a single colony, 

 during a period of 30 days; or 600 pounds 

 from a single colony in thirty days. This 

 record has never been beaten, if I am cor- 

 rect, by any single colony, from any one 

 source of nectar supply during the same num- 

 ber of days. I once had a colony which 

 gave a yield of 66 lbs. of basswood honey in 

 three days, and 302 in ten days, and proba- 

 bly might have done nearly as well as Gal- 

 lup's had the Mow of nectar continued as 

 long. From the above I believe if Mr. Howe 

 can move his bees to the basswood and re- 

 turn them at an expense of about one dollar 

 per colony, he would do well, even in a rath- 

 er poor season, as a yield of ten pounds per 

 colony would nearly if not quite pay for the 

 moving. And should the cost come up to 

 $1.50 per colony, 15 to 17 pounds would cov- 

 er that with the present price of honey. 



By going back over my account with my 

 bees for the past 30 years I find that, from 

 basswood alone, my yield of honey has been 

 about 55 pounds on an average from each 

 colony, each year. This is the average yield 

 of the apiary, not the yield of an individual 



colony. Now, to be on the safe side, sup- 

 pose we call 50 pounds as the average yield, 

 or what we could expect one year with anoth- 

 er, from basswood, and that it will cost 20 

 pounds of that yield for moving the bees to 

 the basswood, we shall have 30 fbs. per colo- 

 ny left as the profit. This, at 10 cts. per 

 pound, would give us $3 00 per colony; and 

 if Mr. Howe has 100 colonies his profit above 

 the cost would be $300 00, which would be 

 an item worth considering. 



To his second question. I will say that, up 

 to five years ago, I never knew of an entire 

 failure of nectar from the basswood. That 

 season we had a freeze which formed ice 

 half an inch thick after the basswood com- 

 menced to leave out, and for this reason 

 there was not any basswood bloom at all that 

 year, hence an entire failure; then three 

 years ago a freeze killed all the buds on the 

 low ground, but on the hills there was some 

 bloom, but not enough to give any thing like 

 a full yield. Aside from this the shortest 

 flow I ever knew gave a three-days' yield, in 

 which honey was so plentiful that the bees 

 could not prepare room fast enough to store 

 it, with a gradual tapering off of two days 

 more, making five days in all. The longest 

 gave a yield of 25 days, with three of them 

 so cold that the bees could work only a little 

 in the middle of the day. The state of the 

 atmosphere has much to do with the secretion 

 of nectar in the basswood flowers. The most 

 unfavorable weather is a cold, rainy, cloudy 

 spell, with the air or wind in a northerly di- 

 rection. If basswood bloom came at a time 

 of year when we were likely to have much 

 such weather, there might be some doubt 

 about moving to the basswood being profit- 

 able; but, as a rule, we have very little such 

 weather while basswood is in bloom. We 

 are more apt to have showery weather with 

 the air charged with electricity, at which 

 time the nectar will almost drop from the 

 blossoms, providing no rain comes within 

 two or three miles from the apiary. At such 

 times as this I have seen honey sparkling in 

 the bloom after it had fallen to the ground — 

 so much so as to attract my attention in the 

 morning sunshine. Then this nectar is al- 

 most or quite honey, not sweetened water, 

 which makes basswood doubly valuable over 

 most of other honey-secreting plants or trees. 

 At times when basswood was yielding its 

 best I have seen fully a bee- load of honey in 

 a single flower, and from one stem of blos- 

 soms I have jarred two to three thick drops of 

 nectar into the palm of my hand, enough so 

 it would run from the hand. But, of course, 

 such an extreme has occurred only three or 

 four times in my forty years of apicultural 

 life. 



In answering the third question I will say 

 that the fruit- buds and leaflets to all trees 

 with which I a*m familiar are formed in June 

 and July of the preceding year, so the results 

 of next season's honey yield, so far as buds 

 and flowers are concerned, are already form- 

 ed in embryo, on the apparently bare and 

 lifeless branches of the basswood-trees, as we 

 behold them these zero days of winter. They 



