236 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 



and that they thrive better here than east of the mountains. 

 A good hive here will make two hundred pounds of honey, or 

 may be made to produce twenty swarms in a season, an in- 

 crease ten times as great, and a production of honey five times 

 as large as that in the Eastern States. Mr. H. Hamilton, a 

 bee-keeper of Stockton, reports that he had thirty-five swarms 

 of bees on the first of February, 1860 ; and by the first of 

 October, they had increased to five hundred hives, and pro- 

 duced twenty thousand and seventy-five pounds of honey ; a 

 production said to be without parallel. Bees are not idle during 

 six months of the year, as in New York, but busy during nine 

 or ten months. They find their food in wild and cultivated 

 flowers, in the blossoms of manzanita bushes, fruit-trees, grasses, 

 clovers, and grains, in grapes, fruits, and honey-dew. They 

 seem to thrive in the driest portions of the state, where there 

 are no cultivated fields and no flowers or green herbage. They 

 are very fond of apricots, which they eat in places where the 

 skin has been previously cut through by bugs. When the 

 latter have made a hole, the bees come and eat side by side 

 with the bugs, which are of the "lady-bug" kind, and other 

 similar species. Many of the bees lose their lives in conse- 

 quence of their fondness for the apricot. Either they eat too 

 much, or they eat the meat after it has passed into the alco- 

 holic fermentation ; but whether intoxicated or surfeited, they 

 are unable to get home, and they perish during the night. In 

 places where the honey-dew is abundant, especially in the 

 mountains on the eastern border of the Tulare valley, the 

 bees make honey very rapidly. When the food for bees was 

 becoming scarce in the midsummer of 1860, in the Santa Clara 

 valley, a man owning seventy hives sent them to the vicinity 

 of Visalia, so thnt thev could o-et honev-dew. Indeed it is the 

 custom of several bee-keepers in California, to move their bees 

 about from place to place, according to the pasturfe and the 

 season. Hitherto little honey has been sold in the market, the 

 chief object of bee-keepers being to produce swarms, which 

 for a time were worth one hundred dollars each. This busi- 



