114 



THE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER 



July 



cents per pound above buckwheat hon- 

 ey, and this proves that Mr. Quinby 

 was right when he said in the sixties, 

 that "all boxes two-thirds sealed over, 

 containing white honey, should be taken 

 off before buckwheat honey was stored 

 in them at the beginning of that yield, 

 as partly sealed boxes of white honey 

 w^ould bring more than when finished 

 with dark honey." 



HONET CANDYING IN THE COMB 



Question: — A neighbor tells me that 

 honey never candies in the combs, and 

 thinks it strange that I think otherwise. 

 I am sure I have seen comb honey can- 

 died, and I told him' that honey did 

 candy in the comb. Which of us is 

 right? 



Answer:— If the honey is left in the 

 hive the year around, then your neigh- 

 bor .may be very nearly correct; but I 

 have never, in my recollection, had seal- 

 ed honey away from the bees over win- 

 ter without its candying, except where 

 it was stored in a room kept warm by 

 a fire all the while. Now, while this 

 candying of honey in the combs is of 

 no great disadvantage when such honey 

 is to be lised by the bees for the pur- 

 pose of feeding themselves, yet it is 

 a great misfortune to have section hon- 

 ey candy, for it spoils its looks or its 

 selling readily in the market, and, as 

 far as I know, there is no way of get- 

 ting it from the combs, or of liquify- 

 ing it in the combs by any plan, which 

 will leave it in shape to ever become 

 marketable. Where we have much 

 section-honev which is liable to l)e left, 

 so as to go into the cold of winter be- 

 fore it is sold, it is always best to car- 

 ry it into a room where the tempera- 

 ture is kept at from 70 to 75 degrees all 

 the time for where so left, it will not 

 candy, and will keep perfectly for an in- 

 definite number of years. I once visit- 

 ed a bee-keeper in the dead of winter, 

 and noticed that he had a portion of 

 one side of his living room, near the 

 s*(0ve partitioned off by a large curtain 

 hanging down from the sealing above. 

 After a little I was that curious to know 

 what was behind there, (mistrusting 

 that he had comb honey behind) that I 

 asked him about it. He immediately 

 lifted the curtain, and behind it was 

 nearly two tons of comb honey all nice- 

 ly crated for market; the crates so piled 

 that the warmed air from the base-burn- 



ing coal stove, which made this room 

 so comfortable during winter, could cir- 

 culate all about each crate, and in this 

 way he had kept honey from a year of 

 plenty over till a poor year, and reaped 

 a good sum of money on the extra 

 price he obtained in the poor year, over 

 and above what he could have gotten for 

 it the year before. He had some of 

 this honey on the table for supper, and 

 I thought it of better body and flavor 

 than was the same honey the fall before, 

 as I had sampled his honey during the 

 September before. 



Could a large store-house be built 

 and kept at the right temperature dur- 

 ing winter, I believe it would pay bee- 

 keepers well to store their honey and 

 hold it over when there were years of 

 a downpour of honey, and tl*ius make 

 a good thing by the high price in a 

 year of scarcity, as well as to keep from 

 breaking down the market by rushing 

 all produced in the plentiful year into 

 market during the fall and winter of 

 the same. 



Borodino. X. Y., May 29, 1902. 



INDEPENDENCE OF THOUGHT. 



IT IS URGENTLY RECOMMKNDED IN THE 

 STTTDY OF APICULTURE 



(Arthur C. Miller.) 



APPARENTLY one of the needs 

 of bee-keepers today is clo- 

 ger observation. We look but do 

 not see. Since the beginning of 

 bee culture it has been the belief 

 of observers that bees offered 

 food to the queen, drones, and to each 

 other with their tongue. I too believed 

 this and for nineteen years thought I 

 so saw it but closer observation induc- 

 ed by a study of the structure of the 

 bee, led to the discovery that the former 

 belief was an error. After once having 

 seen how the feeding was actually done 

 I wondered how I could ever have 

 thought I saw otherwise. Many theories 

 of practice have been built on the er- 

 roneous idea of feeding, and I think it 

 will be found that other practices in re- 

 gard to bees are founded on equallv er- 

 roneous beliefs. 



For a long time it has been claimed 

 that the Italian bee was superior to all 

 others, and any attempt to controvert 



