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THE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER 



May 



bees later on, being able to get pollen 

 in the natural way, which they can 

 manipulate more easily, and it is al- 

 lowed to remain in the hive partly fill- 

 ing numbers of cells which otherwise 

 would be used for brood. 



I tried the feeding of pea meal in 

 England, where at one time its use 

 was advocated by man}', but only in 

 exceptional districts is it now used, 

 where little or no early pollen can be 

 obtained in the natural way until 

 much later in the season. It was 

 found that many of the combs were half 

 filled with this meal, honey being plac- 

 ed on the top of it and sealed over, 

 having both the weight and appearance 

 of being full of honey. Little honey, 

 however, was obtained from them in 

 the extractor, and the pollen-bound 

 combs had to be melted down. Some- 

 times the bees will bite away the comb, 

 down to the midrib, and roll the hard 

 masses of meal out at the entrance and 

 the labor and time occupied in doing 

 this is considerable. I have seen this 

 occur in my own apiary. 



In going over the colonies in the au- 

 tumn, the bee-keeper often feeds some 

 of them with insuiTicient stores and 

 gives the combs taken from the brood 

 nest sealed over in the early season, 

 and being dark in color does not ex- 

 tract them, but keeps them for this 

 purpose, to find later on that the 

 weight of combs was not all honey, 

 and that the bees have sufifered for 

 want of stores. 



PHILADELPHIA BEE-KEEPERS. 



I would like to say I spent a very 

 pleasant day at Mount Holly, N. J. 

 with the Philadelphia Bee-Keepers' As- 

 sociation, which Mr. Harold Hornor 

 had kindly invited, and was much pleas- 

 ed with all I saw. The apiary consist- 

 ing of more than loo colonies, was ex- 

 ceedingly neat and well kept, and all 

 appeared to be strong in bees, which 

 had given him a considerable harvest 

 of very good honey which I sampled. 

 He evidently has a good strain of very 

 gentle bees, the members of the asso- 

 ciation walking about and standing 

 among the hives and I did not see a 

 single angry bee. 



Philadelphia, Pa., April 15, 1903. 



The editor is expecting a letter from 

 you. 



Old Comb vs. New for Extracting 

 Purposes. 



(W. W. McNeal.) 



TO A MAN up a tree it looks very 

 much as though honey pro- 

 ducers in many instances are 

 making the same mistake in this mat- 

 ter they did with queen bees — losing 

 sight of practical worth and following 

 the color line. 



When I speak of old comb don't 

 understand me to mean any old thing 

 in that respect; I mean combs that 

 are nicely built in the frames, the kind 

 you are proud of in the brood chamber. 

 One of the nice points in the manage- 

 ment of bees is to make them show a 

 willingness to enter the supers. Un- 

 less the apiarist is master of this, he 

 holds a very uncertain hand. But the 

 trick is easily turned by the use of 

 those old blackened combs so assuring 

 to the younger bees. There can be 

 no question as to the superiority of 

 such combs for this purpose. The bees 

 recognize in them greater warmth and 

 protection and having been the cradle 

 of bees gone before, the wax-working 

 element of the colony feel right at 

 home while upon them. 



Give a colony a super of combs made 

 up alternately of old and new comb 

 and in nearly every instance the bees 

 will seek the former, storing thfe first 

 honey in them that is carried above. 

 I admit the newly-made comb looks 

 more tasty, but that the honey stored 

 in it is really superior I am not so 

 certain. 



Honey taken from black combs con- 

 taining large quantities of pollen and 

 brood in all stages of development 

 cannot help bring inferior in quality. 

 But there is no necessitj' of such a 

 state of things in the extracting 

 supers. Combs made black by usage 

 may be entirely free from everything 

 save the thickened linings of the cell- 

 walls. This I do not believe, at pres- 

 ent, to be sufficiently detrimental to 

 warrant their exclusion as extracting 

 combs. Better compromise the matter 

 by keeping about one-half of each kind, 

 using the older combs early in the sea- 

 son to coax the bees above, and then 

 the others when work is well agoing in 

 the supers. 



The fear that black combs will dis- 

 color honey is usually much greater 

 than the facts will bear out. While 



