884 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



Fig. 11. — Apiary of Jas. Armstrong, Inspector of Apiaries for a district in Ontario. 



in his yard, and took a picture of one cor- 

 ner of it which is shown in Fig. 11. The 

 location of the yard made it impossible to 

 secure any thing like a comprehensive view 

 of the whole apiary. Mr. Armstrong uses 

 eight-frame hives, as will be noticed, and he 

 expected to get at his extracting soon. 

 Hives tiered up in this way always look 

 good to me. 



There is considerable sweet clover along 

 the roadside in certain parts of southern 

 Ontario ; but as yet it is still considered a 

 noxious weed, and the farmers are constant- 

 ly neglecting imj^ortant work to keep the 

 sweet clover along the roadside mowed 

 down. When the experiment stations of so 

 many of our States are publishing bulletins 

 telling of the value of sweet clover, and 

 when the United States Department of 

 Agriculture has published such a complete 

 bulletin telling of the value of sweet clover 

 to the soil, etc., it seems strange that there 

 should still be so many localities, in our 

 own country too, where hundreds of dollars 

 are spent right along in the frantic attempt 

 to wipe out every sprig of sweet clover that 

 dai'es show itself above the surface of the 

 soiL If it were not such a serious matter 

 it would seem ridiculous to think of all of 

 the time and money spent to combat so 

 terrible ( ?) a foe. Sweet clover is not a foe 

 to the farmers at all in the first place; and 

 in the second it is the easiest thing in the 

 world to kill off if it is not wanted. In some 

 places in Ontario it grows very luxuriantly, 



Fig. 12. One of the roads that we passed 

 had a solid bank of white sweet clover on 

 the left, and another solid bank of the yel- 

 low variety on the right. Fig. 13. The 

 shorter, less bushy growth of the yellow 

 sweet clover, shows plainly. 



We called at the apiary of Mr. Arthur F. 

 Hodgson, who spent three seasons with Mr. 

 Holtermann, but were disappointed in not 

 finding him at home. We took a picture of 

 his escape-board, the principal features of 

 which were set forth in his article on page 

 577, Aug. 15. The picture in question is 

 shown in Fig. 14. Mr. Holtermann has 

 never used bee-escapes to amount to any 

 thing, for the reason that honey removed 

 by the use of the ordinary bee-escape board 

 is cold, and therefore very difficult to ex- 

 tract rapidly. The new board certainly 

 overcomes this undesirable feature ; and Mr. 

 Holtermann, who has been so long an advo- 

 cate of shaking and brushing bees from 

 extracting-combs, told me just before I left 

 that he believed he would use a couple of 

 hundred escapes of this pattern himself 

 another sen^n'i 



Since the illustration of this ventilated 

 escrpe-board in the Aug. 15th issue there 

 have been a number of objections suggest- 

 ed, which may or may not be serious. It is 

 true that a wire-cloth escape-board is not 

 a very rigid affair, and it is possible that 

 they would get broken pretty easily, espe- 

 cially if the bees build brace-combs to the 

 wire cloth or when the frames were badly 



