THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW 



271 



suits wonld be secured, so far as 

 swarmin,e^ is concerned, if tlie old queen 

 were removed until the bees had been 

 four days without unsealed brood, and 

 then returned ag^ain. I have, for sev- 

 eral years, sold tested queens in the 

 sprincr, and introduced youn^ laying- 

 queens from the South in their places, 

 and it almost entirely prevented 

 swarming-. Many of these queens 

 were introduced to colonies that had 

 first built a batch of queen cells, and 

 all colonies would be without a laying- 

 queen a few days while the young 

 queen was being introduced, and it is 

 possible that this same principle of 

 leaving the bees with a scarcity of un- 

 sealed brood for a short time is wliat 

 worked the change. El wood, and 

 others who practice removing or c.iging 

 the queen at the beginning of the 

 swarming season, releasing her again 

 in 1.5 or 20 days, cutting out the queen 

 cells in the meantime, are taking ex- 

 actly the course advocated by our 

 frierd Getaz. While it may make no 

 practical difference in the working of 

 the plan, there is always a lot of satis- 

 faction to some of us in knowing "the 

 reason why. ' ' 



The Good Seasons Will Come Again. 



I have a most sensible letter from a 

 subscriber in one of the Southern 

 States. He writes rather discourag- 

 ingly in regard to his location, saying 

 that there have been repeated failures, 

 year after year, and, in two years he 

 has fed 20 barrels of sugar to keep tiie 

 bees alive. 



In former years he had harvested 

 crops that were phenominal, and was 

 able to rear queens continually from 

 March to October, with no feeding at 

 all. Now all this is changed. He 

 says the question with him is, shall he 

 go somewhere else ? Upon investiga- 

 tion, he says it has found that nearly 

 all localities have periods of failure, 

 the same as he is now experiencing-. 

 He has about concluded that nothing 



may be gained by changing-. If the 

 same kinds of honey producing- plants 

 are present, in larg-e numbers, as those 

 that furnished the bigf crops of the 

 past, I think I should stay by them. 

 Along- in the nineties we had very poor 

 honey crops here in Michig-an— so poor 

 that I came as near being discourag-ed 

 as I ever did. I began to feel that, as 

 the country was being cleared up, the 

 honey plants were disappearing-, and 

 that the g-ood crops were things of the 

 past, and not of the future. In this I 

 was mistaken. The last three years 

 have furnished excellent harvests. As 

 reported recently, in the Review, one 

 bee-keeper near here secured, last year, 

 nearly 100 pounds of comb honey, per 

 colony, from 60 colonies, spring--count. 

 Taking the country as a whole, it 

 appears as thoug-h the crop for this 

 year will be a light one, but Michigan 

 is furnishing a good crop. And, so it 

 goes. That is, the good seasons come 

 and go; and, unless the plants have 

 been destroyed that furnish the 

 honey, unless the conditions have 

 been radically changed in some man- 

 ner, I think it doubtful if it is wise to 

 change localities because of a few 

 years of failure. 



MP-mrmJt^jtM'r^>' 



Comb Honey Production in the West. 



Here is another criticism upon my 

 plan of comb honey production. It 

 comes from that veteran, E. F. 

 Atwater, who lives in Idaho, He 

 says: — 



Friend W. Z.^Your system for the 

 production of comb honey as given on 

 page 178, of the June Review is no 

 doubt much better for your locality, or 

 the Eastern States in general, than for 

 any part of the arid West. P'irst, the 

 super nearest completion must never, 

 for more than a very few days, be 

 separated from the brood-nest by more 

 than one super. 



To induce the bees to begin work, 

 the third or fourth super may be put 

 next the brood-nest for a short time 

 and then raised to the top. When two 

 or more supers are on the hive, as a 

 rule I want the super nearest comple- 



