"HE AMERICAN BEE KEEPEE. 



Jamian 



of bees with the combs already fur- 

 nished brought in so much honey that 

 the hive was really a pretty good lift. 

 I had taken the weight on hiving them 

 aud when the scales showed that they 

 had actually brought in and stored in 

 the combs something like thirty 

 pounds of honey I could hardly be- 

 lieve my senses. Let us consider a 

 little. Bee culture was at a low ebb 

 in our neighborhood then. Almost 

 everybody I talked with said that 

 since the forests had been cut down 

 bees did not pay any more. Some men 

 had twenty or thirty hives, and had 

 not received as many pounds of honey 

 for several years. The almost univer- 

 sal decision seemed to be that "bees 

 didn't pay for the bother." Of course 

 they didn't. There wasn't any bother 

 and there wasn't any pay, 



I increased ray stock of bees to 

 something like thirty or forty colonies; 

 gave each colony an Italian queen, 

 the daughter of ray original Lang- 

 stroth queen. During the season after 

 this I secured 6,102 pounds of ex- 

 tracted honey. As this was during the 

 time of war prices, 1 sold almost the 

 entire crop at 2") cents a pound. But 

 let me not presume to take too much 

 of the credit right here. Other skill- 

 ful beekeepers were in the field, and 

 when accounts came out in the papers 

 telling of the enormous crops that had 

 been secured in occasional instances, 

 scattered here and there, thousands of 

 people went into the new industrv. 

 As in everything else, however, only 

 a comparatively few succeeded. A 

 good many of us were surprised to 

 discover that there seemed to be no 

 precise locality where the business al- 

 ways succeeded. A colony of bees 

 under some circumstances might 



gather two hundred or ever thret 

 hundred pounds of honey in a seasor 

 by the use of the extractor; and on( 

 man in Iowa was so sure he cotild d( 

 it every time that he made a bet oi 

 challenge at one of our beekeepers 

 conventions. He had just secured ar 

 enormous crop from the great bass 

 wood-timbered regions of his state 

 Nobody took up his offer, however 

 and I have never heard that he has 

 done anything remarkable in bee cul 

 ture since. 



Atone time it seemtd as thougl 

 New York State was the banner stat( 

 of the union for honey. Then Cal 

 ifornia eclipsed New York, and finall} 

 Wisconsin left them all in the shade 

 in regard to the number of tons thai 

 might be secured from a given area. 

 After that Florida came in and broke 

 the record. Within two or three years 

 past, however, the region around 

 Phcenix, Ariz,, has seemed to furnish 

 more carloads of honey than the same 

 area in any part of the world. I vis- 

 ited a man just about a year ago whc 

 had about three hundred stands oi 

 bees in Arizona, and these bees were 

 all in one spot right around his home 

 Now, it has been pretty generally de- 

 cided that a hundred hives in one 

 place is as many as can be kept in one 

 locality; but this man actually secured 

 a crop of beautiful honey, averaging 

 over two hundred pounds per colony! 

 This seems almost incredible, but the 

 neighbors all around him for miles in 

 different directions did pretty nearly 

 as well. The immense crop was se- 

 cured principally from miles of alfalfa, 

 fields kept growing in wonderful 

 luxuriance by the aid of irrigating 

 canals which almost exhaust the en- k 

 tire water of Salt River. 



