THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



627 



WEEKLY EDITION 



OF THE 



THOMAS G. NEWMAN, 



Vol. XXI. Oct. 7, 1885. No. 40. 



APICULTURAL NEWS ITEMS. 



EDITORIAL AND SELECTED. 



Honey Wine— Mr. C. J. Quinby, of 

 Whito Plains, N. Y., says : "My method of 

 makiii); wino is a modification of several 

 receipts in a little worlc entitled ' Honey as 

 Food and Medicine," by the editor of the 

 American Bee .Iouhnai.. Honey malfesa 

 tine wine, the only secret is the old one, 

 'Good in all things,' handled carefully and 

 understandingly." 



Bees and '.Bailifl«,— Connty-coiirt bail- 

 itrs have, from time immemorial, been 

 siilijeeted to much unpleasant treatment, 

 L>ut probablj^ the most remarkable mode of 

 assault yet discovered for them was the 

 subject of a trial at Northampton, England. 

 It transpired that on the bailiffs entering a 

 house at Woodford to levy an execution, the 

 occupant, named Samuel Gunns, threw a 

 hive of bees at them, and immediately 

 locked the olficers in a room with the 

 infuriated insects. Pleasant for the bailiffs ! 

 Gunns is evidently a man of inventive 

 genius.— Xyondon Paper. 



thus : describes his 

 E. Pond, Jr., Fox- 



O, Coldenrod, bright goldenrod ! 

 You spring from out the barren sod. 

 On worn-out places where no grain 

 Springs up to meet the sun and rain. 

 I love to pluck your i)lumes of light. 

 And deck them with my robe of white ; 

 To see them gleaming fold on fold. 

 Gold upon white and white on gold. 



Xhe Recent IVet Weather has very 

 materiahy interfered with the Fairs in 

 several States. 



luITIaineit is estimated that there are 

 12,000 colonies of bees, and the annual 

 honey crop is worth about :§40,000. 



Nectar In tlie Flowers is controlled 

 largely by electricity in the atmosphere. 

 When storms are frequent, the general 

 report is that the blossoms contain no 

 nectar. Cyclones, tornadoes, hail storms, 

 thunder and lightning- are largely the cause 

 of a poor honey crop. The past two seasons 

 were surprising expamples of too much 

 electricity in the atmosphere, with a cor- 

 responding lack of honey. 



Mr.-*. Fader, at Gouldville, Pa., was stung 

 on the upper lip by several bees while 

 passing through an apiary of cross bees. 

 Her husband withdrew the stings, applied 

 wet earth to the wounds, and took her to 

 the house. In a few minutes she fell to the 

 floor in convulsions, with her nostrils and 

 lip so swollen that she could only breathe 

 through her mouth. A Doctor was sent for, 

 but before he came she died. She was 28 

 years of age, and lived but 4.') minutes alter 

 she was stung. Of course her system must 

 have been in a very bad condition, and the 

 poison took immediate and deadly effect, 



Wlien marketing Extracted Honey, 



It is a sad blunder to use barrels holding from 

 .300 to .500 pounds— they are too large to be 

 desirable forthe trade, too bulky to be hand- 

 led with care in transportation, and too dear 

 to be lucrative to the producer, for honey 

 put up in such large barrels is subject to a 

 discount of one cent per pound, because of 

 the dilBculty in disposing of it without 

 repacking and dividing into smaller lots. 



nr. J. B. mason 



visit to the apiary of .1. 

 boro, Mass. ; 



He has a large law practice and keeps 

 bees only as a means of recreative exercise, 

 and from a deep love of the occupation. 

 He is one of the most enthusiastic bee- 

 keepers I have ever met, and at the same 

 time is thoroughly posted in apiculture as 

 well as in law. He has kept as many as 50 

 or 00 colonies at a time, although he has but 

 7 at the present time. He is a hard student 

 in entomology, and often sacritices a colony 

 for the purpose of proving or disproving a 

 principle. The condition of his apiary 

 proved to ine that he knew how to take care 

 of it. He wintered his bees on the summer 

 stands. 



" Artlflclal Honey is made by a ma- 

 chine invented by a Wisconsin woman," is 

 the sttipid announcement made by the 

 Chicago Mail of Sept. 26, 388.'). 



Thcie is not the slightest foundation for 

 such a base assertion I The only Wisconsin 

 woman who has invented any thing con- 

 nected with bee-culture is Mrs. Dunham, of 

 Do Perc, Wis. Her invention was a comb- 

 foundation mill for pressing corrugations 

 into sheets of wax, to assist the bees in 

 making comb in which they store pure 

 honey— Hot a macliine for making artificial 

 honey ! Ignoraut or sensational reporters 

 are continually "blundering" or wilfully 

 misrepresenting everything connected with 

 bee-culture, greatly to the injury of the 

 pursuit. 



This, like Prof. Wiley's falsehood which he 

 says he wrote as a scientific pleasantry, and 

 the Detroit paper's falsehood concerning a 

 certain Michigan bee-keeper adulterating 

 his honey, and other falsehoods of a similar 

 character, are scattered over the earth by 

 " winged lightning," but a contradiction of 

 such villainous falsehoods never catches up 

 with them ! 



As an Example of careless handling. Dr. 

 Tinker sent a nucleus of his Syrio-Albino 

 bees containg a valuable queen, by express, 

 to the Michigan State Fair, but they had 

 been used so roughly, having been thrown 

 around by the expressmen, that they were 

 returned to the Doctor before the Fair, in 

 order to save the queen, if possible. Clearly 

 the express company should he held re- 

 sponsible for such inexcusable smashing by 

 its employes. It is an outrage. 



In 4;erniany the different Governments 

 are so alive to the importance of this source 

 of profit to the peasant from keeping bees, 

 that the children are taughtthe best method 

 of bee-culture, and a school-raastcrdocs not 

 receive his diploma until he satisfies the 

 State Examiner that he is familiar with the 

 science of a hienenvater. 



Ether and Clilorol'orni have been used 

 by some with success while introducing 

 queens, uniting colonies, etc. At the To- 

 ronto Convention of the North American 

 Bee-Keepers' Society, Mr. Jones said that he 

 used a smoker containing three sponges, 

 that in the middle having a few drops of 

 chloroform upon it. By fumigating the 

 hive with this, all the fight was taken out of 

 the bees and they accepted the queen given 

 them and made no attempt to injure her, 

 even after the recovered from the effects 

 of the chloroform. This method, he said, 

 was simple, safe, and the cost for chloroform 

 only one cent for each queen introduced. 



Mr. Langstroth caused a good deal of 

 laughter by describing some experiments he 

 had conducted in feeding bees with sugar 

 moistened with brandy, in order to be able 

 to safely introduce a new queen. Said he : 

 " It's no harm to make bees drunk, I guess. 

 If some of you want to see some fun, get 

 some bees drunk, and watch them. You 

 never saw such a consequential creature as 

 a bee." His experiments, however, were a 

 failure, for as soon as the bees "Sobered 

 up," they destroyed the queen given to 

 them. 



P. Bach etherizes bees when he wishes to 

 unite them. He places the sponge, moist- 

 ened with the ana?sthetic, in the hive. As 

 soon as the bees fall to the bottom of the 

 hives, they are united and soon revive upon 

 receiving fresh air. 



Mrs. H. Hills had an excellent exhibit 

 of bees, honey, etc. at the Sheboygan, Wis., 

 County Fair. The local paper notices it 

 thus : 



Among the many exhibits in the Hall on 

 the Fair Grounds, one worthy of more than 

 a jiassin^! notice, is that of Mrs. Henry Hills. 

 It ooTuprisos a most elaborate display of 

 bees, their products, appliances, etc. ."They 

 are: a show-case of honey in packages, glass 

 jars and i)ails ; extractor with hives of 

 combs to be extracted on the grounds, if 

 convenient ; wax -extractor with specimens 

 of wax from both cappings and combs; ob- 

 servatory hive with bees at work, shipping 

 cage containing one pound of bees ready to 

 ship, tunnell and brush for caging them, 

 cages containing queens ready to ship, bee- 

 veil and gloves, hiving net and pole, tele- 

 phone by which to toll when bees are 

 swarming, wintering hive, 100-pound can 

 with honey-gate for filling pails and jars at 

 retail stores, botanical specimens of honey- 

 producing plants, file of three leading bee- 

 periodicals in patent binders, three books 

 on apiculture, surplus cases for comb 

 honey, wired frames of foundation, also 

 some with foundation drawn out just ready 

 for the bees to deposit the lionev, combs 

 containing brood in all stages, with queen- 

 cells just started, comb-cage for introduc- 

 ing a valuable queen safely on comb of 

 brood, queen-excluder for keeping the 

 queen out of the upper story of the hive, 

 scissors for clipping wings of queens, wire 

 for brood-frames, implement for pressing 

 wires into the foundation, etc. 



Mrs. Hills informs us that she could have 

 sold almost any amount of honey at the 

 Fair, had she been provided with it— the gen- 

 eral preference being for extracted honey. 

 What an excellent method of creating a 

 local market for honey ! 



