204 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



Stray Stra^vs 



De. C. C. Miller, Marengo, 111. 



That tramp beekeeper spreading bee- 

 disease, p. 138, suggests the thought that it 

 would be some help in such a case if there 

 were some way by which a man would have 

 to buy the right to territory before he could 

 dump sick bees upon it. 



R. F. HoLTERMANN, p. 123, you enumer- 

 ate the advantages of the % top-bar over 

 one % thick. That's all right for extract- 

 ing; but the beginner should be told that 

 these advantages are overbalanced by the 

 wliiter sections obtained over % top-bars. 

 [Many others have testified to the thing 

 mentioned by Dr. Miller; namely, that sec- 

 tions are wliiter and cleaner over a yg-ii^ch 

 top-bar than with a % or %. 



Beginners who start out-apiaries with 

 their automobiles will never know the thrills 

 we older ones had with our horses. But 

 they were thrills of fright and fear. The 

 worst scrapes I ever had with bees were in 

 connection witli horses, and I always drew 

 a long breath when well started away from 

 an out-apiary. I never had any very bad 

 accident, but some narrow escapes, and 

 there was always that dread which helps to 

 turn one's hair white. 



L. C. BoussEAU sends design for self- 

 spacing. Sole leather ^4 indi thick, sliced 

 nearly through in i/4-inch squares, to be 

 cut entirely apart after center holes are 

 punched. Ought to be good if bees don't 

 gnaw them. [Dr. Miller forwarded to us 

 specimens of the sole-leather spacers. Even 

 if such leather were sliced so as to be ^4 

 inch thick it might swell out or dry up. If 

 the latter, it might shrink down to one 

 eighth. This would render it useless. — Ed.] 



J. L. Byer, p. 141, I feel a bit shaky 

 about insisting that 32 to 35 would be an 

 ideal temperature in a four or five months' 

 winter confinement of bees. I'd give some- 

 thing to know what it is. Please say what 

 temperature you would prefer without any 

 change for a five-months' pull. But I've 

 some question whether 32 to 35 would start 

 brood-rearing as soon as a much lower tem- 

 perature. You know brood-reai-ing starts 

 earlier outdoors than it does in cellar; and 

 isn't that because it is so much colder out- 

 doors? 



E. D. TowNSEND says of foul brood, 

 Review, 45, " Once in a locality, always in 

 that locality. One can free a hive of the 

 disease, very probably a yard, but not a 

 locality of any considerable area." I guess 

 that's about right, Bro. Townsend, at least 

 regarding the European brand. [This state- 



ment of Mr. Townsend is generally true, 

 but not always so. We have apiaries Avhere 

 foul brood formerly existed, but they have 

 been free from the disease for many years. 

 But if foul brood once gets into a set of 

 combs it will keep cropping out from year 

 to year in the apiary where they are used ; 

 and then the only thing to do is to melt all 

 the combs and start anew on fresh founda- 

 tion. That is precisely what we had to do 

 in the yards that originally had foul brood. 

 We have never had European foul brood in 

 our yards, and therefore can not speak 

 from experience. — Ed.] 



Apropos of J. M. Munro's letter about 

 bees changing color, p. 129, J. Kruse," Cen- 

 tralhlatt, 343, gives a circumstantial ac- 

 count of several cases of changing to dark- 

 er color, and vice versa, caused by change 

 of location and pasturage. Buckwheat and 

 heather darken the color. This change oc- 

 curred during the life of the same queen, 

 and there was also a change in the charac- 

 ter of the bees! [We arise to inquire if 

 this is true. Does the color of tlie honey 

 affect the color of the bees? We are frank 

 to say that it does look reasonable. We 

 admit that the kind of honey sometimes af- 

 fects the temper of the bees, or rather, we 

 should say, the manner in which the honey 

 is secreted from the nectaries of the flowers. 

 A plant like buclavheat that secretes honey 

 only during the early hours, and then stops, 

 will make bees crosser than the white clover 

 tliat secretes honey all day. — Ed.] . 



Dr. Zander says that at 68 degrees Fahr. 

 a man requires 3 1-3 times as much air as a 

 lot of frogs weighing as much as the man, 

 and a bunch of bees of the same weight re- 

 quires 74 times as much air as the man ! 

 Commenting on this, Franz Riehter figures 

 that at 68 degrees a colony weighing 13 

 pounds requires hourly the enormous quan- 

 tity of half a cubic meter of air, or 17.6 

 cubic feet ! — Bienenvater, 61. I thought I 

 had a pretty liigh conception of the impor- 

 tance of air for bees, but I'll have to run it 

 up another peg. [You seem to thing a 

 cubic half meter of air is a large quantity. 

 To us it seems rather small. A good deal 

 will depend, however, on whether the bees 

 are in a semi-quiescent condition in the cel- 

 lar or outdoors. In the former place they 

 would not require, at a mere guess, more 

 than a fourth the air that they would when 

 they are active in summer. 



We are quite prepared to believe that a 

 man would require three times as much air 

 as a lot of frogs weighing the same. — En.] 



