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THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW 



any honey weighing less than 12 

 pounds to the gallon, neither have I 

 ever had a pound of sour honey to 

 fuss with. Let your aim be to pro- 

 duce a good article, free from all im- 

 purities; put your name and address 

 on every package, and you will have 

 no trouble to sell it at a good price. 



Another very important thing is to 

 so manage your bees so as to get a 

 large yield from them; for when you 

 realize that you are likely to receive 

 only from five to seven cents per pound, 

 you will see it takes a large quantity 

 to bring a fair income. 



Still another thing to look after, is 

 to be sure you have enough honey left 

 in the hives at all times to carry the 

 bees safely through a honey dearth in 

 summer, or through a long, cold win- 

 ter. This is very necessary in this 

 locality as the mercury frequently 

 drops thirty, and sometimes forty, de- 

 grees in twenty-four hours, in either 

 winter or summer. About thirty 

 years ago, when I commenced to run 

 my bees for extracted honey, I found 

 it so easy to get their honey that I ex- 

 tracted too often, and when one of 

 those sudden changes came I would 

 have a large number of colonies on 

 the verge of starving. 



HOW TO SECURE LARGE YIELDS. 



And now I will tell you in as few 

 words as I can, how, with the help of 

 one of my sons, we produce extracted 

 honey. We get all of our colonies 

 strong in bees, and their hives full of 

 brood and capped honey, about two 

 weeks before we expect a harvest that 

 will give us some surplus. Then we 

 put a hive of empty combs on top of 

 each colony. This gives the queen 

 lots of room to lay, as she now has 

 full swing in eighteen combs. It also 

 checks the desire to swarm. We leave 

 them in this way until the harvest is 

 about to begin, when we put a wood- 

 zinc-queen-excluding honey-board be- 

 between the upper and lower stories. 



being careful to have the queen in the 

 under hive. 



In about ten days we commence to 

 extract, always being careful not to 

 extract combs containing much brood. 

 This management gives us a strong 

 colony until the harvest is over, which, 

 with us, is about September 1st, when 

 we are done extracting, and put 

 away the extra combs after the bees 

 have them all cleaned up. 



I think I hear someone say: "What! 

 let the bees loose on the combs wet 

 from the extractor?" Yes, we fre- 

 quently set out three or four hundred 

 hives of wet combs on a bright, warm 

 afternoon, when the sun is about two 

 hours high. The bees will clean them 

 up in about an hour, and I have never 

 had a case of robbing, or any harm, 

 come from so doing, although I have 

 done it hundreds of times. 



Something like thirty years ago, 

 Prof. Cook (I think it was) said that 

 it was not necessary for bees to cap 

 their honey in the combs before ex- 

 tracting, if we would ripen it suffi- 

 ciently ourselves before putting it into 

 barrels. This I tested thoroughly and 

 found the Professor was right. I 

 then had five tanks made, and lined 

 with tin, each one having a capacity 

 of over 4,000 pounds, which we used 

 as follows: Our apiary is on ground 

 sloping to the southeast. Our extract- 

 ing building is in the center of the 

 yard, while the storage tanks are in 

 another building enough below the 

 extracting house so that the honey 

 will run from the extractor through a 

 pipe into the top of either tank. These 

 tanks are covered with thin sheeting 

 so that the moisture can easily escape 

 from the honey; and, at the same time, 

 not allow an ant or a particle of dirt 

 to enter the tank. The honey goes 

 through a wire cloth strainer before it 

 enters the tank. These storage build- 

 ings are only about six and one-half 

 feet high, with a fiat, tin roof painted 

 dark to draw tlie heat. In this way 



