190cS 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



627 



Fancies and 

 Fallacies 



By J. E. Crane 



Those engravings of the buckling of founda- 

 tion in sections, p. L52, are perfect. It tries my 

 patience just to look at tliem. 



# 



L. E. Mercer's cartwheel arrangement of bee- 

 house and apiary, p. 149, is novel and good, but 

 not very economical of space. When hives are 

 in straight rows, why not have open spaces in the 

 rows or through the rows in a direct line from 

 the house to anv part of the yard.^ 

 # 



On pages 158 and 159 Mr. Fr. Greiner makes 

 some very interesting suggestions, and valuable 

 ones as well. Let us plain honey-producers re- 

 member the use of a pin stuck in a stick for trans- 

 ferring those little soft crescent-shaped baby 

 larvx, which to me is the dread of artificial 

 queen-rearing. 



A CHE.AP AND SERVICEABLE FEEDER. 



By the way, I used a new style of atmospheric 

 feeder last fall. Being short of feeders I sent for 

 100 friction-top gallon cans. We had only to 

 punch the cap full of holes, and we had 100 feed- 

 ers holding about 10 lbs. of syrup, at a cost of 10 

 cts. apiece. When through feeding they can be 

 cleaned, and used for a long time. 



LIQUEFYING CANDIED COMB HONEY. 



The hot-air method of liquefying honey as 

 described on page 145 is of considerable value. 

 We have put in steam apparatus for this purpose 

 the past season, and find it is easy to keep the 

 temperature of our tank-room from 90 to 110 de- 

 grees. Honey kept there for a day or two is 

 much more readily liquefied when placed in a 

 water bath at 140. 



# 



MAKE ALL THE MONEY YOU CAN. 



"While you are making money at keeping 

 bees, why not make all you can.?" says Louis H. 

 Scholl, page 206. Well, that depends. I have 

 tried it a great many times, and never yet suc- 

 ceeded. It is a good deal like trying to get 

 every hill of corn to yield as well as the best hill. 

 I never could. Our seasons vary so that I al- 

 most always find at the close of a season I have 

 made some mistake. 



* 



ARTIFICIALLY REARED QUEENS. 



Mr. Greiner, p. 158, fears that artificial queen- 

 rearing will cause a deterioration of our bees. 

 Guess not. Read and read again what Mr. Al- 

 exander says, p. 210. Let me quote: "As I look 

 back I find that the seasons when we received 

 our largest surplus have been, without a single 

 exception, the ones following the year when we 

 reared our queens from some special queen whose 

 colony had given us an unusual amount of sur- 

 plus the previous summer. It requires only four 

 or fi\e years of careful selection to make a great 

 change in bees in their honey-gathering qual- 



ities and in their disposition, until they seem 

 like quite a different race of bees." This does 

 not look like deterioration. Better tack this 

 paragraph up over the door of the honey-house. 



ADULTERATION AND MISBRANDING. 



W. K. Morrison, p. 202, says there is very lit- 

 tle adulteration now. I believe he is correct; 

 but while a single firm can put out, or bottle, 

 500,000 lbs. and upward, in one year, of South- 

 ern and amber California honey, and mark it all 

 "pure clover honey," there will be room for 

 some missionary work. [Give this firm's name 

 over to the Secretary of Agriculture, Washing- 

 ton, D. C. This would stop such work. — Ed.] 

 * 



HONEY AT HOTELS. 



"Honey as an article of food at our leading 

 hotels" is worth while to keep drumming up. I 

 can bear witness to the good quality of the hon- 

 ey at the American House, Medina; and it is 

 good advice, too, to supply them with only the 

 best. And, say! another thing — when traveling 

 ask your waiters at the tables for honey. It is 

 amusing to see the vacant look on their faces as 

 they retire and come back to inform you in a 

 meek wav that thev have none. 



COMB-HONEY COLONIES SHORT OF STORES. 



Stray Straws, p. 139, quotes Doolittle as saying 

 that, in his locality, a colony which has stored 

 comb honey is rarely short of stores for winter, 

 but thinks it not true at Marengo with eight- 

 frame hives. It is not true here, even with ten 

 or twelve frame hives. There is a great differ- 

 ence whether we have only clover for surplus or 

 clover, basswood, and buckwheat. Clover usu- 

 ally fails in July with the hive full of brood and 

 scant stores. 



PROHIBITION ON PULLMAN CARS. 



Stray Straw, p. 200, "Prohibition, nowadays, 

 is all the while cropping out in new places and in 

 new ways." Just so. Recently the Pullman 

 Car Co. ordered all their cars in the United 

 States to discontinue the sale of intoxicating liq- 

 uors. Now if they will sell comb honey in all 

 of their dining-cars, as they do in some of them, 

 the bee-keepers of the country will be the last to 

 complain. [Good suggestion. We may tell 

 you on the sly that some bee-keepers are already 

 furnishing the Pullman people comb honey, and 

 they are buying lots of it. — Ed.] 



* 



DOOLITTLE's SIMPLE PLAN OF REQUEENING. 



In this same article, page 159, Mr. Greiner 

 discusses requeening, and the best methods of in- 

 troducing the young queens, none of which 

 seem so simple and inexpensive, especially where 

 extracted honey is produced, as that described on 

 pages 45 and 111 of "Scientific Queen-rearing," 

 by Doolittle, which is, briefly, this: Hatch a 

 young queen in an upper story and shake her 

 with the rest of the bees below, or in front of the 

 entrance, when she will surely supersede the old 

 queen. I think every year I will try this meth- 

 od on a larger scale; but when the time comes I 

 find my hands so full of other things that I do 

 not carry out my plans. 



