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A MONTHLY JOURNAL 

 Devoted to the Interests of Honey Producers. 

 $L00 A YEAR. 



w. 1. dUTCHiNSON, Efiiior aDfl Proprietof 



VOL. XVllL FLINT, MICHIGAN, SEPTHsTlgOsTNoTa 



Somme ©f i^Ihe Depths from W&ilclh 



.©©■piim^ 



E. W. ALEXANDER. 



ieia. 



Y young friend, please come with 

 me, and we will take a view of 

 bee-keepingr as I found it 50 years ago, 

 when I was a boy of only 10 years. 

 At that time my father kept quite a 

 large apiary, and the hives were mostly 

 the common box hives. We had as 

 nearly as I can remember, about 20 

 Bevan hives which had bars across the 

 top with the under side beveled off to a 

 sharp edge in the center, so as to cause 

 the bees to make their combs straight 

 along the bar. These were, at that 

 time, considered a great hive, and I 

 will speak of them again, but the most 

 of his colonies were in common hem- 

 lock boxes, of many different sizes and 

 shapes; some of them not having as 

 much as an auger hole in the top to 

 allow the putting on of a small box for 

 surplus honey. 



NO SMOKERS NOR VEILS. 



We had no "head-rigs" in those days 

 to protect our faces when handling our 

 bees, neither did we have any smokers 

 o quiet those cross, black bees, and. 



oh, how they would sting ! When 

 father was around to help me, he would 

 take a pipe and blow some tobacco 

 smoke into the entrance of the hive be- 

 fore disturbing the bees, but as he had 

 a farm to attend to, and was a sur- 

 veyor, he had little time to attend to 

 bees; so when I thought a hive needed 

 attending to, I would go at it without 

 any protection whatever. I have always 

 had a great dislike for tobacco, espe- 

 cially the smoke, so I used to think of 

 the stings and the smoke, and of the 

 two evils I preferred the stings. When 

 I wanted to find out something about 

 the inside of a colony, I would take the 

 hive into the currant bushes and go to 

 work. Oh my, how I rfz'fl'used to catch 

 it from those bees ! Many times I 

 would run to the house, crying, have 

 my mother take the stings out of my 

 face, and then go back and finish what- 

 ever I had undertaken. Sometimes I 

 would want to find the queen, and I 

 would have to dig out most all of the 

 combs in order to find her. Other 

 times I would want to know how long it 



