AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 275 



Pres. Abbott seems all waked up to some kind of necessity as to larger meetings 

 of the North American, but like the rest of us, he's rubbing his eyes without seeing 

 very clearly what ought to be done. The plain truth is that the meetings are 

 largely local, and that the membership is confined almost exclusively to those 

 who actually attend. The " representative delegate " idea that Pres. Abbott urges 

 is good as far as it goes, but I doubt if he can bring it down to county societies. 

 And how often is there anything that a society wants to instruct a delegate to vote 

 for? Questions in practical bee-keeping are the most important things at a conven- 

 tion, and on such things it is not often that a man should be instructed beforehand 

 how to vote. If I am not mistaken, the way some of the large memberships are 

 secured in other countries is to have such advantages accrue to a member that he 

 will be glad to pay his membership fee even if he doesn't attend. What inducement 

 is held out for me to become a member if I don't expect to attend ? 



Doolittle says (page 209) that you can tell whether bees are queenless by giving 

 them unsealed brood, when, if they are queenless they will start queen-cells. Nearly 

 always that's good proof of queenlessness, but there are exceptions. This summer 

 I introduced a queen to No. 28, and on looking a few days later I found a number 

 of queen-cells started. I said at once, "They've killed their queen." Looking 

 farther, however, I found the queen all right. I also found queen-cells in No. 1, 

 whose queen had not been changed for a year, and as they were post-constructed 

 cells, I was surprised to find the queen all right. In both these cases, however, I 

 think the bees supposed there was danger of the queen being destroyed, as in the 

 case of No. 1 a number of foreign bees had been added. 



What a difference a little thing like a comma sometimes makes. On page 211, 

 2nd column, line 4, " three strips of wood — one wide, one on each side, and a narrow 



one " puzzled me for a time. You see four strips are enumerated instead of 



three, but if you drop out a comma and make it " one wide one on each side," then 

 it's all right. 



That plan of W. C. Lyman is quite interesting. The plan given by T. I. Dug- 

 dale I can endorse from actual trial. Possibly the Lyman plan is better. But why 

 not merely leave a hole for drones to get out, without any escape ? The escape may 

 prevent bees from using that place as an entrance, but what harm if they do ? 



Now comes F. L.Thompson (page 213) as champion of those troublesome 

 things — closed-end frames. I have one colony in them, and I dread to touch the 

 sticking things. And yet, and yet. Between you and me I've a kind of a notion 

 that the colony does a little better on account of being in those frames. You see 

 it's a good deal as Bro. Thompson says — there's no big hallway at each end of the 

 hive to keep things cold, but all is closed up as tight as in a box-hive. Good joke 

 on us if we'd all work toward closed-ends some of these days. 



I wish Dr. Hicks had given chapter and verse where in Holy Writ we read that 

 honey was prominently used as a medicine. 



W. H. Morse's advice to plant linden or basswood is good. There are two ways 

 to get the thing done without much expense. One is to get other people to plant 

 them for you. Suppose you want to plant 100 trees. Of course you must get your 

 trees before you plant them. Now when you have got them, if you give half of them 

 away to people that want to plant shade trees within a mile of you, it will be just 

 about as well as if they were on your own land. Or, you can sell them at a bargain. 



