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AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



under certain circumstances and condi- 

 tions will undoubtedly pay so far as my 

 experience goes, but it is like other 

 things connected with our occupation, 

 that is, it is rather risky. Sometimes it 

 will pay, and sometimes it will not pay. 

 Sometimes you feed and build colonies 

 up strong until about white clover time, 

 and then you have no crop, and the bees 

 will undoubtedly starve unless you look 

 after them pretty closely. What I am 

 keeping bees for, and what I am in the 

 bee-business for, is the dollars and cents, 

 and I expect to stay in it. I have 160 

 acres of corn, meadow, etc., and I would 

 hate to tell you whet I have got off of it. 

 I am not going to throw up farming just 

 because I do not get anything at all, and 

 I am not going to throw up bees be- 

 cause I do not get any honey. I do not 

 believe any amount of faith will put 

 honey in the pail when it is not there. 

 I have bees that are going to get honey 

 if there is any. I have not had any 

 honey-flow since I have been in bee-keep- 

 ing. But I am going to build up my 

 business just as fast as I can. 



Frank Benton — I have contended for 

 very many years that stimulative feed- 

 ing is at the bottom of all success in bee- 

 keeping. But it is only with myself 

 that I have contended— have tried to 

 consider the matter from all standpoints 

 and subject it to careful experiment, be- 

 cause there have been so many against 

 me, some of them especially being those 

 with whom a controversy once entered 

 upon would be never-ending. I believe 

 that to obtain the best results it is nec- 

 essary to stimulate whenever bees are 

 not gathering honey and yet can fly 

 out for exercise. I would have a prolific 

 race of bees, and I would have the 

 choicest and most prolific queens of that 

 race. A prolific queen is the corner- 

 stone of success. Whenever bees are not 

 gathering honey, and the winds are raw 

 and cold, 1 would still stimulate them, 

 but this can be carried too far. When- 

 ever in the middle of the season an im- 

 portant yield of honey is anticipated it 

 is easy by stimulative feeding to get the 

 hives crowded with bees ready for that 

 harvest. After that it may, or, accord- 

 ing to circumstances, it may not bo profit- 

 able to stimulate them. If no honey 

 comes in for a time, so that brood-rear- 

 ing ceases, and if it is still possible to 

 rear workers in time for a fall flow, by 

 all means resort to stimulative feeding 

 if the time can be found to attend to it. 

 Or if the colonies have become reduced 

 too much during the last honey-flow, the 

 remaining bees being mainly old ones, it 

 will pay to stimulate some even though 



no fall flow can be expected. They will 

 be in better condition for winter. To 

 illustrate: the past summer from about 

 the first week of July to the end of 

 August my bees brought in no honey. 

 My time would not permit me to go all 

 over them and stimulate them regularly, 

 but it would have paid me 100 per cent, 

 to have done so. They had honey in 

 their combs, in fact many of them much 

 more than they needed, for I had been 

 otherwise too busy to remove all they 

 might have spared, knowing I would not 

 have time to feed regularly. Yet I know 

 as the result of repeated experiments 

 along this line that it would have been a 

 profitable undertaking to have stimu- 

 lated brood-rearing by frequent feeding. 

 What comes in daily is, in general, dur- 

 ing mild or warm weather, what regu- 

 lates the amount of brood a given queen 

 will produce. Pew colonies will draw 

 much on their sealed stores to keep up 

 brood-rearing. If the workers have 

 passed through a harvest, they dwindle 

 rapidly after that, and their places must 

 be supplied by others, else the colony is 

 in no condition for another honey-har- 

 vest that season nor for the winter, es- 

 pecially if they have much time to fly 

 out and get reduced before cold weather 

 commences. In September we had a 

 moderate yield (chiefly from wild asters), 

 and just those colonies which had been 

 stimulated occasionally during the long 

 summer drouth and honey-dearth, stored 

 more than the others — many of them 

 four or five times as much. They were 

 so much stronger in bees they could send 

 a force into the fields. I am sure the 

 immediate return in honey from my bees 

 would have been greater had I not in- 

 creased my colonies beyond such a num- 

 ber as I could have stimulated regularly 

 during the summer. But I have shown 

 my faith in the future profitableness of 

 bee-keeping by increasing my apiary 

 until it numbers 140 colonies. In this 

 connection I wish to make one other 

 statement. I have kept bees from my 

 childhood, and for more than 20 years 

 have engaged in this business exclu- 

 sively ; my experience has, moreover, 

 been in several different States of the 

 Union, and in a number of foreign coun- 

 tries under conditions of climate and 

 pasturage which have diff'ered very 

 widely from each other, having been 

 located in tropical, again in sub-tropical, 

 northern and Alpine regions, yet when 

 my colonies have been in excellent con- 

 dition— such as they can always be kept 

 up to by feeding at the proper time — I 

 never yet experienced a season when 

 they did not gather enough to last all 



