1896. 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



643 



a mistake, and that had he been better posted, the six cases 

 would have turned out to be only granulated honey. Let this 

 be as it may, bee-keepers cannot afford to adopt any method 

 which will lower the standard of comb honey, or render it any 

 less tempting to the human palate. Therefore, my advice is, 

 not to be in a hurry about adopting this method of adding to 

 the sum total of the comb honey crop until it has been demon- 

 strated that the points which I have suggested are not well 

 taken. 



Since writing the above, I have been talking with a bee- 

 keeper who used drawn combs for the first time this season, 

 and he said some of his honey had begun to sour in the combs 

 at this early date, before he took it off from the hives. 



St. Joseph, Mo. 



Furnishing the Feed in an Apiary oa Shares. 



BY G. M. DOOLITTLE. 



A correspondent sends in three questions and desires that 

 I answer them in the American Bee Journal, which, with your 

 permission, Mr. Editor, I will do. The first question is this : 



"Who furnishes the feed when the apiary is worked on 

 shares, for stimulating purposes, or to keep the bees from 

 starvation, when they do not have stores enough in the fall 

 for winter ? In other words, what is the custom regarding 

 such feeding ?" 



Well, I do not know that there is any custom. The only 

 way that I know to govern such matters Is to enter into an 

 agreement explicit enough to cover all cases of emergency, 

 and have it put down in black and white, and then live up to 

 it according to the Christian rule laid down in the Good Book, 

 " who sweareth to his own hurt and changeth not;" for if 

 you go into " bees on shares," some one is apt, as a rule, to 

 have their feelings, if not their pocket-book, hurt. 



If you took the bees in the spring and the owner of them 

 said nothing whether they had honey enough to carry them 

 through to the time new honey came in, and they were short 

 of feed, I should think that he should furnish the feed, were 

 they likely to starve. 



As to feeding to stimulate, I do not think that it can be 

 made to pay for the feed and the time. If you are to have the 

 bees for a term of years, and they do not have honey enough 

 in the hives any fall for the bees to come through in good 

 condition till swarming-time the next year, then I should say 

 that the person taking the bees is the one who should furnish 

 the feed. If both were to share and share alike in the^profits 

 from the bees (the way in which bees are usually let out on 

 shares), then I should say that both should bear equally the 

 expense of feeding, whenever it is necessary to be done. 



But in addition to what I said above, about bees on 

 • shares, I would say with emphasis, don't. Far better pur- 

 chase two or three colonies, work your way up with them as 

 your knowledge increases, thus being "your own man " all 

 the while, than to try to gain a knowledge regarding the 

 business by building yourself up on some other person's 

 property along this line. Almost any other partnership busi- 

 ness works better than it does with bees. 



CONTROLLING DRONES. 



The next question asked is as follows : " I have five colo- 

 nies of bees — three blacks and two Italians. I wish to secure 

 the pure nating of my queens another year. Would it be well 

 to give the Italians a frame of drone-comb and put drone-traps 

 on the blacks when the young Italian queens are mating? or 

 is there a better way ?" 



If the correspondent is desirous of having his queens 

 purely mated, of course he must kill or control all drones from 

 undesirable colonies. The drones can be controlled with the 

 traps; but in this case you must buy the traps, keep them on 

 the colonics, and furnish the money necessary to rear and feed 



the drones, all of whiih is an expense that would better be 

 avoided. 



If you think that you must rear the drones, and do not 

 wish to buy traps, you can put a piece of perforated zinc at 

 the entrance of the undesirable colonies, keeping it there till 

 four o'clock, then remove and let the drones out ; and while 

 out, replace and keep the most of them out for evening de- 

 struction. This would be about the only way with box-hives, 

 unless the trap was used. But for frame hives (and I would 

 advise the use of no others) much the best way would be to 

 remove all of the drone-comb, or nearly so, from the black 

 colonies, and replace it with worker-comb, and thus you will 

 save all the trouble and cost of producing the drones, and you 

 will rear 50 workers to every square Inch of comb, in place of 

 32 drones, these workers storing honey for you in place of the 

 drones eating it. 



In any event, you could not be sure of having your queens 

 purely mated unless there were no black or hybrid bees in the 

 woods or any apiary for a distance of four or five miles from 

 you in every direction, which is a state of affairs that does not 

 usually exist in most parts of our country. But for honey- 

 production, I doubt whether it would pay to be too careful to 

 have all of your queens purely mated, for a first cross (or what 

 is more truly hybrids than the general mixture which are 

 called hybrids) give nearly, if not quite, as good results in 

 honey as do pure bees of any race. 



If you were to procure Italian queens for the three black 

 colonies and Italianize the blacks before any drones were 



Vice-PreslOcnl \Vm. McEvoy. 



reared in these hives in the spring, you would then have 

 things about as you want them, and that, too, about as cheaply 

 as by any plan I know. These things are quite easy when you 

 come to fully understand all the points bearing on the same. 



THE BKE-MOTH LABV.E KILLED BY FROST. 



The third and last question reads thus: " I have read 

 that frost would kill the larvie and eggs of the bee-moth. If 

 so, what temperature will it take to do it ? I have some combs 

 which were exposed to the cold all winter, but worms 

 hatched out in them the next June, or, at least, the worms 

 were at work on them at that time." 



It is generally supposed that a temperature of 10' above 

 zero will destroy all eggs and larvae of the bee-moth ; but, 

 candidly, I do not know whether it will or not. At times I 

 have thought that zero and below was sure death to every- 

 thing in the bee-moth line ; then, again, I have been equally 

 positive that worms which had wintered over somehow in a 



