MARCH 15, 1913 



Conversations with Doolittle 



At Borodino, New York. 



MAKING THE BEST OF A SHORT HONEY-FLOW. 



" In our locality the honey season is very 

 short, and I wish to know of some plan by 

 which I can get into the supers the most of 

 the honey which comes in during the week 

 or ten days of the honey-flow, without wast- 

 ing any of it in brood-reai'ing." 



" It will be necessary for you to have 

 plenty of stores for feed during the spring 

 months, so that brood-rearing can go on 

 rapidly, that the combs may be well filled 

 with brood, and the hive well filled with 

 bees when your short flow commences." 



" An old beekeeper advised me to make a 

 syrup to feed the bees by mixing sugar and 

 water in equal proportions for feed, so that 

 the combs might be filled Avith this syrup at 

 the beginning of the harvest, except that 

 part filled with brood. In this way, he said, 

 when nectar comes in from the fields it 

 would have to go into the sections, as there 

 would be no other place for it to be stored." 

 " Did he think that would be better than 

 to have an abundance of honey stores in the 

 combs? " 



" He seemed to think so, for he said it 

 was advisable to feed all the colonies, as 

 those that already had enough food would 

 be stimulated by the feeding, and, as a con- 

 sequence, would commence raising a lot 

 more brood than they otherwise would. 

 This would mean a host of young bees at 

 the right time ; which in turn would mean a 

 big crop of honey from my short bloom. 

 He said that many of the beekeepers of the 

 United States who lived in localities like 

 mine could just as well be getting quite a 

 surplus, and no little money from it, as to 

 be going along on the old plans of securing 

 little or no surplus with nothing but bees 

 for winter. And, often, such a locality would 

 have a downpour of honey, in which ease 

 the hives, if filled with capped sugar stores, 

 and just fairly boiling over with bees, would 

 have no room for the big flow except in the 

 supers where it is wanted." 



" Well, that sounds well. But did he say 

 any thing about the cost and labor necessary 

 for such a procedure ? " 



" That was a point I brought up ; but he 

 met it with the fact that farmers think 

 nothing of feeding their stock, except to get 

 returns. He claimed that the one who would 

 say he could not afford to feed his cows well 

 because of the cost of the hay and grain 

 that he would feed them would be consider- 

 ed a fool indeed." 



" Suppose, however, that you can secure 

 the same result by carrying over combs of 



honey from the previous year, what is the 

 object in buying sugar and feeders, and 

 going through with all of this multitudi- 

 nous labor of feeding every day for six or 

 eight weeks?" 



"I hinted at this; but he said that the 

 one who depended upon the bees having 

 enough stores to carry them through to the 

 honey harvest properly, generally found 

 that their enough proved so little that the 

 bees would scrimp and economize, so that 

 their stores might be made to last. In this 

 way, he arg-ued, brood-rearing would be 

 cut down ; and when the season opened, the 

 hives Avould have few bees, but little brood, 

 and plenty of empty comb in which to store 

 the first honey which came in from the 

 fields." 



" Well, I have to confess that your man, 

 whoever he was, was a good talker; and if 

 it were not true that there are some obsta- 

 cles in the way of carrying out this plan 

 he would have an argument that it would 

 be hard for any of us to get around. One 

 is the fact that only as you have the most 

 prolific queens Avill the brood-rearing be 

 kept up at the maximum where every-day 

 feeding is resorted to for weeks in suffi- 

 cient quantities to stimulate brood-rearing. 

 With nine colonies out of ten, the bees 

 would begin to crowd down the queen by 

 storing too much of the feed, in which 

 case there would be few bees in the hive 

 and very little brood. The sealed honey 

 above and about the brood would be so 

 great that the average strain of bees would 

 not cross over this vast amount of honey to 

 store in the sections even the little which the 

 bees would gather ; and the result would be 

 that, instead of a big crop of honey, that 

 coming in from the fields would be still 

 further used to crowd out the brood. When 

 winter arrived, the ckister of bees would be 

 too small to survive, especially if the colony 

 were wintered out of doors. 



" Then, too, if everything worked as you 

 were told, and lots of bees were obtained to 

 take advantage of the sections as soon as 

 the flow of nectar commenced, these combs 

 of sugar syrup would soon largely give 

 place to combs filled with brood, as both 

 queen and bees are more largely stimulated 

 with nectar coming from the fields than 

 they are with sugar syrup coming from a 

 feeder. In this way queens which are good 

 enough to keep up the maximum amount of 

 brood under feeding sugar syrup would 

 make a gain as soon as the nectar began to 

 come in from the fields, and the sugar syrup 



Continued on page 176. 



