236 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



among the bees. Put the combs carefully 

 in the same manner as you took them out, 

 and close up the hive. If clone in warm 

 weather not one queen in a hundred will be 

 killed by the bees; but if it is late in the 

 fall and the weather is cold, it is saft?r to 

 introduce in the old way, by caging the 

 queen among the combs for 24 hours. 

 Vanneck, Out. A. C. Attwood, 



Wintering on Summer Stands. 



HEAD BEFOKE THE MICH. CONVENTION. 



I will here briefly give my present man- 

 ner of wintering, with its results, and the 

 circumstances and causes that have led to 

 its adoption. 



I have never had either a cellar or out- 

 door building, in which to winter bees, that 

 I considered to be in every respect suitable 

 for that purpose, neither do I now think 

 that wintering them in any such repository, 

 no matter how suitable it may be, is equal, 

 all things considered, to wintering them on 

 their summer stands, by setting the hive in 

 a larger box and packing the space all 

 around and above them with dry wheat 

 chaif. , ^, , 



When what is now known as the bee- 

 disease, the bee malady, or spring dwindl- 

 ing, first made its appearance some 7 or 8 

 years since, devastating as it did in some 

 cases, large apiaries; others as well as my- 

 self were led to devise some more success- 

 ful way of wintering than any we had pre- 

 viously adopted. 



In the autumn of 1871, 1 had 50 colonies, 5 

 ■of them were in hives with the brood 

 department about 18 in. long, 16 in. high, 8 

 in. wide, with a space designed for boxes 

 on each side, the size of the breeding de- 

 partment, except that it was only 6 in. 

 wide. This space, and also about 4 in. 

 above the frames was packed snugly with 

 •dry chaff. None of them were lost during 

 the following winter and spring, although 3 

 of them were reduced to quite small 

 ■colonies; witli one of the 3 queenless. A 

 few of the remaining 45 colonies were left 

 on their summer stands, but a large propor- 

 tion of them were wintered in my granary. 

 They were set on the floor, the cover taken 

 off, a cloth spread on the frames, and the 

 spaces between the hives filled with dry 

 sawdust, and also 2 or 3 in. of sawdust 

 spread over the whole mass of hives, leav- 

 ing only a small hole directly over each 

 hive and kept open with a tube for ventila- 

 tion. Most of them came through the win- 

 ter in apparent good order, but dAvindled 

 away very fast after they were set out in 

 the spring; so that by June 1st they were 

 reduced from 50 to 14 or 15 colonies, with 

 perhaps bees enough in them all for 7 or 8 

 good strong stocks. 



I commenced the following winter with 

 ■50 colonies, 15 of them inside box hives, 

 packed with chaff, the same as the 5 were 

 the previous year. The remaining 35 I at- 

 tempted to winter in various other ways, 

 which I will not now enumerate. In May, 

 1873, they were again reduced from 50 to 15 

 colonies, with 11 of them in chaff-packed 

 hives. Four of them were strong colonies, 

 the others were more or less reduced from 

 strong stocks down to a mere handful. The 

 heavy loss sustained during tlie two succes- 

 sive Avinters above named, taken in connec- 



tion with the fact that for several preceding 

 years 1 have obtained but little surplus 

 honey, was certainly rather discouraging, 

 even to an old bee-keeper. And I frankly 

 acknowledge that if 1 could at tha>t time 

 have sold everything I had belonging to the 

 apiary at a reasonable price, I should have 

 sold out with the intention of forever aban- 

 doning the business. 



I have frequently been asked why I stop- 

 ped writing for tiie press about this time, if 

 such an experience in wintering is not cal- 

 culated to make one who has for years been 

 teaching others how to winter successfullj% 

 haul in his colors and lower his flag to at 

 least half-mast, he must have more "cheek" 

 than I can command. Instead of trying to 

 teach others, I was so ashamed, mortified, 

 and chagrined at my failures that I felt 

 more like crawling into a hole out of sight, 

 and then drawing the hole in after me. 

 However, the comparatively small loss of 

 bees in the chatt-packed hives gave me 

 some confidence to hope for better results in 

 future, and that together with the encour- 

 agement "worked uj>" by visiting and try- 

 ing to cheer friend Butler, who at this tinie 

 was meeting with similar losses, induced 

 me to give them one more trial, and as the 

 sequel will show, with general success. 



My 15 colonies, in the spring of 1873, were 

 again increased that year to .50, and I ob- 

 tained from them 1,800 lbs. of extracted 

 honey besides what was used in the family. 

 The honey was sold for over $300; had an 

 increase (by using the old combs) of 2>^ 

 stocks and a cash income of over $20 from 

 each colony wintered. This year (1872) I 

 bought dry-goods boxes in which to winter 

 nearly all my bees, at a cost of 50c. each. 

 Some of them would hold 1, 2, and 4 hives 

 each, and leave a space of 3 in. or more on 

 all sides between the hive and box, and also 

 over the top of the hive to fill with chaff. 

 There were no covers to these boxes; an 

 entrance or passage for the bees was made 

 in one side, at the bottom of the box, just 

 above the bottom board, to correspond with 

 that in the hive. A passage was kept open 

 between them by placing two strips of 

 board 3 in. long and 1 in. thick, in the bot- 

 tom of the box, one of them on each side of 

 the entrance, and a piece of board 3 in, 

 wide was then laid across these two strips. 

 The hive was set in the box, the cover taken 

 off, a piece of cloth larger than the top of 

 the hive was spread on the frames, covering 

 the whole of the top of the hive, and all the 

 space around and over it was filled with dry 

 chaff'. To keep it dry it was covered with 

 marsh-hay fastened on with twine. I lost 

 no bees prepared as above during the fol- 

 lowing winter. 



I was so well pleased with the chaff-pack- 

 ing as to make in the summer of 1874 some 

 30 or 40 boxes with tight-board covers ex- 

 pressly for that purpose, each one to con-, 

 tain but one hive. The winter of 1874-5 

 was perhaps the most severe on bees that 

 was ever experienced by the great mass of 

 bee-keepers in the Northern States. It was 

 one that was well calculated to thoroughly 

 test this chaff arrangement. If I remember 

 rightly, I had that winter about 60 hives 

 protected with chaff. 1 lost 4 of them; the 

 4 lost were buried under a snow drift, 8 ft. 

 deep, for more than 2 months. The snow 

 had melted around them; the boxes, chaff, 

 and hives were wet, and the combs wet 

 and mouldy. 



