130 



1HE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER. 



elevated, and if continued season after 

 season there will be no need of so 

 much feeding for winter stores. 



It might be well to add that the 

 large-sized zinc used in the traps above 

 does not in the least hinder workers 

 from going and coming freety. When 

 traps are made queen excluding and 

 used with our double entrance ar- 

 rangement they work like a charm, 

 even better than the single open long 

 passage way. The double entrance 

 plan is a combination of the queen ex- 

 cluding honey board and a trap, which 

 I have previously explained. 



Beverly, Mass, 



^ ■ I. ■ <— 



Progressive Bee Culture. 



BY C. .1. ROBINSON. 



It transpires that now one man can 

 care for several yards on the new sys- 

 tem as easily as he could one in the 

 old. Horace Greely, when importun- 

 ed to keep bees, replied, "I have not 

 the requisite experience to manage 

 them; have tried to keep them and 

 lost all." He lacked the knowledge 

 necessary to make bee-keeping a suc- 

 cess. Had he possessed the practical 

 knowledge of the man who urged him 

 and taken as much pains to make it 

 known as he has of what he knew of 

 farming, he might have added millions 

 of dollars to the wealth of our state 

 annually. In proof of our progres- 

 sion in bee culture, allow me to com- 

 pare results of the new principal with 

 that not so far advanced. 



At the American Bee-Keeper's con- 

 vention, in 1871, in Cincinnati, there 

 were present 120 bee-keepers who 

 owned 5,651 stocks of bees, and had 

 sold from them 83,065 lbs. of honey. 

 We learn by this comparison that 300 

 hives produce now over J as much as 



5,000 did then. A little calculation 

 shows that 5,000 colonies might have 

 produced over four hundred thousand 

 pounds of honey with careful manage- 

 ment on our improved system. It is 

 time that all the agricultural colleges 

 had a professor of aparian sciences. 

 If you send a young man to college 

 and educate him and he does not care 

 to use his knowledge in this direction, 

 it will benefit him as much as a thou- 

 sand other things taught him there 

 and never made available. 



Some one inquires : "Is there enough 

 in it to pay ? What are a few pounds 

 of honey compared with other and 

 greater interests?" Well, have you 

 ever given this a moment's reflection? 

 Further on I will explain this branch 

 of the subject. I will now give a brief 

 retrospective view of bee-keeping. 



My personal knowledge of the busi- 

 ness covers a period of more than half 

 a century. My memory of attending 

 to my father's bees extends back to 

 1830. At that period no progress had 

 been achieved in bee-keeping. At- 

 tempts had been made in Europe with- 

 out practical success, and nothing was 

 known by the rank and file in this 

 country of any bee literature. Until 

 about 1840 nothing concerning bees 

 or bee-keeping appeared in the current 

 literature or books. J. M. Weeks, of 

 Vermont, was the first author of a 

 treatise on bee-keeping. I think a 

 Mr. Wilson put forth a pamphlet in 

 about 1839 cceval with the current 

 writings of Mr. Weeks. He invented 

 and patented a hive that, aside from 

 sectional, movable comb hives, is the 

 best of any ever in use. In 1840 

 Solan Robinson invented a movable 

 section hive called the "book case 



