July, I'JH. 



)( American Bac Joarnal 



younj Queen is purely mated, then she is 

 called a tested q'leen, and he should sell her 

 for a greater price. A breeder i> supposed 

 to be one of the very best to breed from, 

 and the name may mean little or much, de- 

 penilini; upDn circumstances. 



(' When you liesire to have bees stay in a 

 new place, it makes a difference as to the 

 amcutnt of brood and bees used. If you take 

 A single frame of brood with adhering bees 

 from a normal colony and put it in a hive in 

 a new place, without conHnement. the like- 

 lihood is that the bees will desert. If you 

 use five or six frames of brood with adher- 

 ing bees, taking from one or from several 

 colonic-^, it is pretty certain that enough 

 bees will remain to lake good care of the 

 brood. In either case, if you fasten the bees 

 in for two or three days, they will stay put. 

 Better have a small entrance and then close 

 it with green grass or leaves; then if you for- 

 get to open the entrance the bees can open 

 it themselves when the green stuff dries. As 

 to strength, better have two frames with 

 adhering bees, at the very least. If you 

 mean how strong should the divided colony 

 be. it should have at least six frames well 

 filled with brood. 



7. If a considerable amount of feed is to be 

 given, nothing is better than the Miller 

 feeder. The Doolittle is excellent for 

 smaller amounts handy for the bees, b'or an 

 entrance feeder the Boardman is good. 



8. Bees prefer to store in the brood-cham- 

 ber so long as there is brood there, and are 

 not likely to store in supers until after the 

 brood-chamber is filled with brood and 

 honey. If you can sell chunk honey as well 

 as sections, probably you better let sections 

 alone. 



0. Kull sheets are greatly to be preferred 

 to small starters, and you ought to use 

 sheets so large that the foundation will be 

 fastened at the sides, and then you should 

 use wires or foundation splints to help. If 

 the wedge does not hold the foundation in 

 the groove, pjt beside it a thin layer of 

 wood, such as a piece of wooden separator. 

 Or. run melted wax and rosin (about equal 

 parts: along the place of iunction. 



10. There is no better place to keep comb 

 than in the care of bees. If that is not con- 

 venient, keep them in a cool, airy place, 

 spacing them more than 14 inch apart. If 

 they become wormy, treat them to a dose of 

 carbon disulphide. After being thus treated 

 possibly you may keep them in something' 

 moth-tight. 



:i. All your honey will probably be sure to 

 candy. If you heat it to i6o degrees and 

 then seal it air-tight, it may not candy. 



12 That ought to be an excellent invest- 

 ment. The bees will settle the queen ques- 

 tion, but if you lake no precaution a large 

 part of the workers may be killed, too. Put 

 one hive over the other, with a sheet of 

 newspaper between them, and they will 

 probably unite peaceably. 



13. If you dump them at the entrance they 

 will enter of their own accord, without 

 smoke or sprinkling. 



Queen in Two Stories -Wintering — Toads — 

 Robbers 



1. The extracted honey producers here 

 discourage swarming by elevating brood 

 over the excluder. Why wouldn't it be bet- 

 ter to allow the queen to extend her nest in 

 this super, and after swarming danger is 

 over insert excluder, and later see that the 

 queen is below? 



2. A successful honey producer says full 

 sheets of foundation are drawn down to the 

 bottom-bar :'er\ much better when placed 

 in a sutler than in the brood-nest. Is this so ? 



i. A Tennessee beekeeper writes that he 

 wintered most of his i8o colonies in 2 story 

 hives and he never had such strong colo- 



nies; some had 15 brood-frames. Why 

 wouldn't that be the best way to do every 

 winter ? 



4. What quantity of carbon disulphide 

 should be used for a stack of eight 8 frame 

 supers of combs, and how often should the 

 application be made to ensure against wax 

 worms ? 



5. Do toads eat bees to a damaging extent ? 



6. Are the goldens generally recognized 

 as the worst robbers of all bee kind ? The 

 ones I have certainly must be; however, 

 with the miserable slow How we are having 

 they are certainly getting much more honey 

 than are my blacks. Kenti'cky. 



Answers. —I. When the brood is put above 

 the excluder and the queen left below with- 

 out brood, she is in much the same position 

 as if it were a swarm in the lower story, and 

 will not swarm. If allowed to occupy the 

 two stories as you suggest, she is much more 

 likely to swarm. Another thing is that by 

 allowing her the run of the two stories you 



would likely have brood in the combs you 

 want to extract, which is undesirable. 



2. Sure. 



3. With very strong, colonies the plan is 

 excellent. 



4. Four tablesooonfuls ought to suffice. 

 One application is sufficient, unless fresh 

 eggs are laid in them again by the beemoth- 



5. Some cases have been reported in which 

 quite a few bees were killed by toads. 



i I don't remember to have heard that 

 charge against the goldens. I am afraid it's 

 true very often that the best gatherers are 

 inclined to be bad as robbers. Bees have 

 no moral sense, and don't make any distinc- 

 tion between getting stores from the field or 

 from another hive; so why shouldn't the 

 best gatherers be the best— or the worst- 

 robbers ? 



Heaoijuakters of .Allen's .Ai'iarv at .-^lki ^iCER'jrE, N'ew Mexico. 



Transporting B2es Long Distances 



I write this to inform you of a transporta- 

 tion of bees on a long voyage which migh- 

 be interesting and useful to fellow beekeep- 

 ers. Last year, in October. I had a friend 

 going to your country, and I asked him if he 

 would care to bring me a colony of Italian 

 bees from the I'nited States when he re- 

 turned to China in the spring. 



He did so. and left San Francisco on F"eb. 

 id last. It took over 30 days to reach me 

 here in Tientsin. The colony was hived in 

 a lo-frame dovetailed hive, with an extra 

 number of 8 frames full of honey, a super on 

 top filled with 2^ empty i'i-inch square sec- 

 tions, an "eke" under the brood-chamber, 

 bottom-board and cover; a wire-cloth under 

 the cover for ventilation, and another long 

 strip on the entrance. 



On opening the hive, to niydismay, I found 

 all the combs were smashed and broken 

 from the frames, and there were no live 

 bees in the brood-chamber, only about a 



handful of dead ones crushed on the combs 

 and bottom-board. All the live bees, by no 

 means a big number, had cleverly clustered 

 in two emptv sections above. I at once 

 drove them down into a new clean brood- 

 chamber with combs audstores. I then left 

 them alone, as the days were still cold 

 about 40 degrees Kahr. at noon,, but I was 

 very anxious about the queen. 



After a week, as the weather turned 

 warmer. 1 looked carefullr into the brood- 

 chamber and found Her Majesty. You can 

 imagine I was glad beyond expectation I 

 think I am very fortunate in this case, be- 

 cause my friend knows nothingabout bees. 

 That is why the combs were smashed on the 

 voyage. He told me .that he put the colony 

 in the coldest place on the deck of the 

 steamer he traveled bv from San Francisco 

 to rientsin. and while the vessel was in mid- 

 Pacific Ocean, quite a number of the bees 

 found a hole and fiew out. He thought they 

 returned to the hive, but I am afraid they 



