200 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



March 16, 1905. 



(Dpinxons v of 

 Some (Sxpcrts 



J 



Should the National be Incorporated? 



Ques. 83—2^0 yau l/iink it desirable that the Xational Bee-Keepers' 

 Association should be incorporatedf 



Jas. a. Stonb (111.)— Yes. 



J. A. Green (Colo.)— Yes. 



Wm. McEvot (Ont.)— Yes. 



0. 0. POPPLETON (Fla.) — Yes. 



G. M. DOOLITTLE (N. Y.)— No. 



S. T. Pbttit (Ont.)— I do not know. 



N. E. France (Wis.)— Not at present. 



C. Davenport (Minn.)— I do not Isnow. 



Eugene Secor (Iowa)— I doubt if it will pay. 



Kev. M. Mahin (Ind.)— It seems to me desirable. 



Morgan Bros. (8. Dak.)— Yes, all things considered. 



Dr. C. C. Miller (111.)— With my present light, yes. 



E. S. LovEST (Utah)— I think it would be desirable if it should be 

 incorporated. 



P. H. Elwood (N. Y.)— I am not informed as to advantages and 

 disadvantages. 



E. E. Hastt (Ohio)— Quite open to conviction on this point, but 

 rather think not. 



Prof. A. J. Cook (Calif.) — I see no harm, and I can see great 

 possible advantages. 



E. D. Townsend (Mich.)— There is work ahead for the National 

 to do, so it will be necessary to incorporate. 



E. Whitcomb (Nebr.)- Incorporation is of no advantage unless 

 we desire to acquire property ; to sue and be sued. 



R. C. AiKiN (Colo.)— Yes, if we want legal standing. But I am 

 not a lawyer, nor have I thought much on the subject. 



C. P. Dadant (111.)— It can do no harm, and will give more 

 authority to the ofUcers, the (Jeneral Manager especially. 



Dr. J. P. H. Brown (Ga.) — It the Association has any property, 

 or intends to do a business, it would be better to have it incorporated. 



R. L. Tatlor (Mich.) — Yes. Without incorporation it can 

 neither sue nor be sued. Pleading the " baby act ", as it is called, is 

 not looked upon with favor. 



Adrian Getaz (Tenn.)— Yes. It would enable the Association 

 to carry legal business in its own name, and under its own responsi- 

 bility. In a word, using legal terms, it could sue and be sued. 



0. W. Demaree (Ky.)— I do not think so. The good work that 

 has been accomplished by the bee-keepers' societies all over the coun- 

 try is the result of unselfish commingling with the people of all rural 

 pursuits. 



L. StachelhaijSBN (Tex.)— I do not see how the Association 

 could be incorporated except a capital for some business purpose is 

 raised and the members become share-holders. As the Association 

 does no business of this kind as yet, I do not see a possibility or a pur- 

 pose for incorporation. 



C. H. DiBBERN (111.)— This is a legal question rather than an 

 apicultural one. Yes, I think it should be incorporated, to give it 

 legal standing in court. Necessarily, to carry out the intentions and 

 purposes of the Association, many legal questions will come up for 

 solution, and the Association is constantly at a disadvantage without 

 incorporation. 



A Queen-Bee Free as a Ppemlum.— We are now 



booking orders for untested Italian queens to be delivered 

 in May or June. This is the premium offer : To a sub- 

 scriber whose own subscription to the American Bee Jour- 

 nal is paid at least to the end of 1905, we will give an un- 

 tested Italian queen for sending- us one new subscription with 

 $1.00 for the Bee Journal a year. Now is a good time to 

 get new subscribers. If you wish extra copies of the Bee 

 Journal for use as samples, let us know how many you want 

 and we will mail them to you. Address all orders to the 

 office of the American Bee Journal. 



=^ 



VTiv. pasty's 

 Ctftertl^oixgl^ts 



=/ 



The " Old Reliable " seen through New and Unreliable Glasses. 

 By E. E. Hastt, Sta. B Rural, Toledo, Ohio. 



HYBRID BEB3 AND FAIR PREMIUMS. 



And so hybrid bees have an unbroken record of 30 years — taking 

 every first premium for comb honey at the Nebraska State Fair for 

 that time. Noteworthy. I'll venture to guess that this fact does not 

 mean exactly what it seems to mean at first view. I infer that very 

 little honey stored by pure blacks ever comes in — pure blacks so very 

 scarce — thus making it a race between Italians and hybrids. As to 

 the hybrids, presumably one type of them finishes up its honey 

 much as Italians do; while another type of them does it so nearly the 

 same as black bees do that one could scarce tell the diSEerence. The 

 prize-winners belong to the latter type, I take it. Page 61. 



SYRIAN BEES AND QUEEN RECORD. 



And the Syrian bees (as vised by Prof. Benton) seem to hold the 

 record for manipulation of queens. He doesn't appear to say whether 

 they were all at liberty at once, or only part of them, but there were 

 250, and at least a great part of them at liberty at once. Suspicious. 

 Suspicious because it seems to be a going back to a state of things ex- 

 isting before the bee had attained its present high and peculiar state 

 of development. A colony of bees which inclines to build very few 

 queen-cells — and in which two virgins are pretty sure to settle matters 

 at sight with a mortal combat — may not be any better than the colony 

 where the opposite state of things prevails, but the probability lies in 

 that direction, I think. Degeneracy and atavism are things to watch 

 out against. Page 64. 



black foul brood and ITS SPREAD. 



Mr. Stewart's paper on black foul brood is a very lucid one. And 

 when the disease seemed to leap four miles through the air he proved 

 beyond reasonable doubt it seems that bees from diseased apiaries 

 were there. This appears to settle it that it is bees that carry the germs, 

 either in their honey-stomachs or about their bodies somewhere. This 

 is a contribution of considerable magnitude to our knowledge of 

 black brood. When infecting germs do float in the air it is desirable 

 to know that fact; but we don't want to know it when it isn't so. 

 Not only in bee-diseases, but in other diseases also there is a bad, lazy 

 tendency to assume that infection must have traveled in the air when 

 other possible routes have not been half explored. Page 65. 



BEE-PARALYSIS NORTH AND SOUTH. 



O. O. Poppleton draws a decided rein on a prevalent dictum, on 

 page 69. Paralysis more prevalent in the South not because Northern 

 summer climate is unfavorable to it, but because Southern winters 

 don't kill off the infected colonies and Northern winters do. I am not 

 sure that this view of the case is the whole story, or even halt the 

 story ; but it is worth thinking of at least. I do not remember to have 

 seen it in print before, that unusually light clinging to the combs is a 

 prominent sign of paralysis. I suppose this is in part because the 

 diseased bees have never done any work, and therefore the original 

 sharpness of their toes has never been dulled. It is of interest that 

 Mr. i?oppleton finds sulphur an effective cure — and yet he thinks the 

 belter tactics to be to pull down the diseased colonies and build up 

 healthy nuclei with the proceeds. 



TEXAS AND HER FLOWERS. 



Happy Texas I Has 13 months of flowers in a season I This is 

 not wholly a joke, as it is not claimed that there are 13 months in a 

 year. Just notice the possibility of a season being somewhat longer 

 than a year — the too-previousness of the mistletoe and the persistent 

 ever-blooming of the cotton spreading things beyond the calendar 

 sometimes. But alas — 



Nor bee nor bee-keeper can bunt 



To malte flowers Rive down when they won't. 



And horsemint, which we used to think of immediately when Texas 

 honey was spoken uf, is over large areas much less abundant than 

 formerly. Prof. Scholl lays this to several successive dry years cut- 

 ting off the supply of seed. Quite likely he is right in the main ; but 

 Nature has many such pranks, and some of them can not be solved so 

 easily. In my range there used to be square miles of blue lupines. 

 This was on " oak openings " sort of land — and much of the territory 

 would have yielded a good swath of lupines if mown with a scythe. 

 Now there are only scattered plants, and here and there a spot where 

 they are close enough to be neighbors. What's got my lupines — and 

 will they ever come back? Rest of us can hardly find a match for the 

 Texas mesquite, which has two distinct periods of bloom, the second 

 beginning when the beans from the first bloom are getting ripe. Say, 

 that makes two seasons — two seasons in one year. And we wind up 

 as we began, saying: Happy Texas! her seasons are a month longer 

 than elsewhere in the world — and, inddde, there are twice as many of 

 them ! Page 85. 



