632 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



Oct. IfS 



were five stories above the brood-chamber, 

 provided there were none nearer. 



Garden City, Mo. 



[We have had quite a number of reports 

 in years gone by, showing that as much hon- 

 ey will be produced over queen-excluders as 

 where they are not used. If Mr. Doolittle is 

 correct (and we believe he is) , that most of 

 the honey is delivered in the brood nest, and 

 later carried above, there is no reason why 

 there should not be as much honey stored 

 above an excluder as in a super where none 

 are used. — Ed.] 



»■<»■♦ 



THE QUEEN-EXCLUDER NOT A HONEY- 

 EXCLUDER. 



BY F, GREINER. 



It may be said that the larger part of the 

 bee-keepers in Germany do not faver queen- 

 excluders any more than Mr. Louis H. Scholl 

 does, who says, page 491, Aug. 15, that they 

 are not only brood- excluding but also honey- 

 excluding. He says the conditions of a lo- 

 cality may make them less objectionable; 

 and while this is undoubtedly true it appears 

 that hives without excluders show the same 

 symptoms here in New York as in Texas; 

 viz., the brood appears in the upper story. 

 This does not suit many of us, and therefore 

 we are compelled to use the instrument of 

 loss and torture. It does not seem to be as 

 much a matter of locality as it is of the de- 

 mands some of us make on the article we 

 produce. It is not all gold that glitters, and 

 it is not all good honey which is produced 

 under the name of honey, although a man 

 may obtain large yields of inferior or repul- 

 sive honey ana make money by it. A man 

 qf a refined nature or one with a sensitive 

 stomach does not extract from combs con- 

 taining brood. 



We do not want both honey and brood in 

 our extracting-combs. Even if we wait till 

 the brood has matured and has emerged 

 from the cells before extracting, the honey 

 is not nearly as fine in quality, and surely 

 not as appetizing. We may not understand 

 how to run our bees so as to get the most 

 out of them, but we do not want to become 

 rich producing an objectionable article. We 

 may also not be able to read bee nature as 

 well as others. With us our bees locate in 

 the uppermost set of combs, and establish 

 their brood nest there with a ring of honey 

 above the brood. This seems to be their na- 

 ture. This seems to satisfy them, and the 

 lower set of combs is largely neglected. I 

 do not understand what our bees thus unre- 

 stricted do with the honey that others under 

 the different condition store above excluders. 

 In this, the poorest of all seasons some of my 

 colonies in a yard of fifty have given 100 lbs. 

 above the excluder, with not ten pounds in 

 the ten L. frames below. A friend in a more 

 distant county took this year, in an only me- 

 dium good season. 265 lbs. from his best col- 

 ' ony over the detested excluder. All our 

 colonies I run for extracted honey are al- 

 ways short of stores in the brood-nest. That 



does not look as though the queen and brood 

 excluder were honey-excluding here; if so, 

 the bees would not carry nearly all the hon- 

 ey above the excluder. 



Mr. Scholl says the queen-excluding hon- 

 ey-board is an expensive implement in its 

 first cost. It does not appear that way to 

 me. It is very cheap as compared with the 

 greater cost of the sectional hive, which Mr. 

 Scholl is adopting more and more in place of 

 the regular and more simple Langstroth hive. 

 But he invests just 'he same, and considers 

 it a good investment. I am with him; but I 

 should not want to be without the queen-ex- 

 cluder. It is a good thing for me. Even in 

 the management of the sectional hive for 

 comb honey, it is an auxiliary which I would 

 not willingly dispense with. Mr. Aikin, of 

 Colorado, and Mr. Hand, of Ohio, neither one 

 a beginner, recorded on Ihese pages how 

 they use the excluder with the sectional hive 

 in the production of comb honey. I am sure 

 they may be excused for their practices. 

 They must think it pays them to pay good 

 money for them. 



Naples, N. Y., August 21. 



HIVE-TOOLS. 



Manipulating Frames; How to Do a Maxi- 

 mum of Work with a Minimum of Fag 

 at the End of the Day's Work. 



BY E. R. ROOT. 



For some years we have been experiment- 

 ing upon several forms of hive-tools. We 

 have had different models sent to us from 

 all over the country, and one or two have 

 been sent from far-away Australia We fi- 

 nally had our blacksmith make up from old 

 buggy- springs several stylesand placed them 

 among our apiarists, asking them to select 

 the one that seemed to suit their purpose 

 best. Among all the tools ihat were submit- 

 ted, a plain flat piece of steel, flattened and 

 sharpened at both ends in the for m of a chisel, 

 one end bent over like a hoe, seemed to give 

 the best satisfaction. See illustration here- 

 with. 



FI. . 1. 



I 



