r»08 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



807 



[The Eastern gradino-rules were adopted at the 

 convention of the National Bee-keepers' Associ- 

 ation in Washington, in 1892. The matter had 

 been thrashed out over and over again; but the 

 rules that were adopted at that meeting, notwith- 

 standing they did not please every one, have 

 seemed to stand better than any thing else. 



It is very seldom that dark or amber cowA hon- 

 eys are marketed if we except buckwheat; and in 

 referring to it we say "fancy buckwheat," "No. 1 

 buckwheat," etc. But when one has a certain 

 lot of nice comb honey that is dark or amber, or 

 of unknown source, or of a mixed source, the 

 only way to mark and grade that honey is by the 

 qualifying adjectives; as, for example, "fancy 

 dark" or "No. 1 amber." There is so little of 

 this honey produced in sections that a very small 

 quantity, comparatively, of it is offered. Practic- 

 ally speaking, we do not hear of "fancy dark" or 

 "fancy amber;" but it seems unavoidable to have 

 these gradings to take care of certain lots of hon- 

 ey that must occasionally be offered. 



The Western grading-rules apply to a strictly 

 Western honey, nearly all of which is white with 

 some amber. In the West, at least in the Colo- 

 rado districts, the honey is graded in the matter 

 of weights by the case, and we nre of the opinion 

 that it would be wise for the Eastern bee-keepers 

 to adopt the same scheme in their grading-rules. 

 It is simply impossible to make every section of 

 a certain grade of the same weight; but it is pos- 

 sible to make all of the sections in a case average 

 up. 



This question is open for discussion, and pos- 

 sibly it may be wise to modify the Eastern rules 

 to take in the scheme of grading by the case as 

 well as by the section. This would be a very 

 proper subject for the next meeting of the National 

 Bee-keepers' Association to discuss at Detroit. 

 The matter is respectfully referred to Secretary 

 Hutchinson. 



We must beg leave to differ with our corre- 

 spondent wherein he believes that fewer grades 

 would be desirable. They might be for one lo- 

 cality; but a set of grading-rules must be expan- 

 sive enough to take in all localities, say east of 

 the Mississippi River or west of it. The time 

 was when there were fewer grading-rules, and 

 trouble resulted from the fact that there was too 

 great a difference between one grade and another. 

 No, no! we feel sure that there should be as many 

 grades as now exist. To go to the other extreme 

 would only be going back to our old difficultv. 

 —Ed.] 



THE TROUBLES OF AN AMATEUR 

 BEE-KEEPER. 



Fall Fooling. 



BY F. DUN DAS TODD. 



"Leave well enough alone!" Not oi \ our 

 life, especially with such interesting pos;il'i Itips 

 as a hive of bees. I considered I had b en dead 

 lucky in landing up against trouble at th Iv y ii - 

 ning of my bee-keeping career; and, havi i- cnnie 

 well through my first campaign, I v\'as ci.ly lo 

 tackle something more difficult, just to ':^>m my- 

 self interested. Happy thought! why mt ii'\ote 



one hive to experimenting with the Ferris double- 

 queen system which was then being described in 

 Gleanings.? 



It was now well on in September — far too late 

 to start with this scheme; but I set to work to 

 make the necessary fittings, got deeply interested 

 and made them for all three hives, and sent for a 

 couple of queens as a starter. 



Problem: given a hive, find the queen. In the 

 sweet springtime it is apt to be rather easy, for 

 bees are few and queens are big; but it is difficult 

 in September, when bees are many and queens 

 are shrinking. I read all the matter in all the 

 books and magazines on finding queens, and 

 could tell the proper procedure with all possible 

 complications. First, choose a sunny day and 

 have the sun at your back; pick out the first frame 

 and quickly glance over the next in the hive, then 

 examine the one in your hand. Then take comb 

 No. 2 and glance at No. 3, then examine the 

 comb in your hand, and so on to the last frame. 

 If unsuccessful, repeat. If still unsuccessful, 

 stack the combs in pairs for a little while. I did 

 all this without success. I had bees everywhere, 

 but not a trace of the queen. Dr. Miller says, 

 and he is an authority, " When the queen must 

 be found " (this was my condition exactly, and 

 by this phrase I knev\' where I was at) — "put the 

 bees through a sieve made up of a hive-body and 

 a queen-excluder frame. " 



Great scheme! On paper it looked fine, and 

 my boy and I both thought if we had been wise 

 we would have tried the last scheme first. Just 

 think of it! pass your bees through a sieve, and 

 the remainder is a queen. No problem at all, for 

 a problem is when you try to do a thing in an 

 undoable way. 



So we nailed a honey-board to the under side 

 of a hive-body and shook into this sieve all bees 

 from the frames and the hive, replaced frames in 

 the hive, put the sieve on top, and awaited de- 

 velopments. Conditions were getting pretty tense 

 as night was approaching, only two hours off, 

 and vye had thousands of bees in the air and in 

 the sieve. Something was wrong somewhere. 

 The bees would not go through the device. Then 

 we smoked them, which started a few of them on 

 the downward path. Smoking, I had often been 

 told, had this effect; but I longed for a wholesale 

 process, as this was too slow. At length I put 

 the cover on the "ieve and retired to have a smoke 

 on my own account, believing it would be less 

 irritating to the bees. Just before sunset I over- 

 hauled the contents of that sieve in a last etfort, 

 and decided that, first, the queen was lost; second] 

 the queen was not lost. Either way it did not 

 matt-r, for I had two queens, so I vvould divide 

 the liive with the division-board, introduce a 

 caged queen on each side, and let it go at that. 

 The queenless side might accept; the other v\ould 

 take care of the intruder. This was done, and 

 on examination a week later I found theold'clip- 

 ped queen in one side and a balled dead queen in 

 the other. 



Next day I opened the other two hives, found 

 the queens without any trouble, put in the divi- 

 sion-board, and the day following introduced 

 queens to the queenless sides. One was accepted 

 by the weakest hive, the other was not. A week 

 later I tried again in the two hives where 1 hui 

 failed; but as the season was now far advanced 1 



