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Kochester, Pa., July IS, 1879. 

 Inclosed I send you this plant. Will you 

 let me have a name for it ? It grows along 

 the Ohio river, on the gravelly banks, from 

 2 to 3 ft. in height, and resembles sweet clo- 

 ver, but it is something else. It is very 

 thick on the ground, blooms all summer and 

 is the finest bee pasture that grows until 

 frost comes. Please let me have a name in 

 English (for it is a perfect harvest for bees) 

 and confer a favor on the bee club here. 

 Wm. W. Cague. 



[The twig you sent is, in plain English, 

 sweet clover (Melilotus alba), and, as you 

 say, is " a perfect harvest for the bees." It 

 is worthy of all the praise that has been 

 given it. In answer to B. M. Lingle,, 

 Paoli, Ind., in this number of Journal, 

 find our experience with it this season.— 

 Ed.1 



Crown City, O., July 22, 1879. 

 There are a great many bees kept in this 

 neighborhood, mostly in common boxes or 

 log gums in a hap-hazard way, and gener- 

 ally winter well. The greatest drawback is 

 too frequent swarming, and the moth takes 

 possession. Very dry here, and bees will 

 hardly get winter supplies. They did very 

 little swarming about here ; are strong in 

 numbers for winter. I will not have a 

 pound of surplus from my 100 colonies. 

 Success to the Journal. 



C. S. Newsom. 



Winchester, Va., August 5, 1879. 

 This has been the poorest season for sur- 

 plus honey that we have had for 10 years ; 

 my yield will not be over half the usual 

 amount per hive. All the bee-keepers I 

 have talked with give the same report. We 

 do not expect any fall surplus ; in my ex- 

 perience of 12 years I have never obtained 

 any surplus honey after July 15, except one 

 year when I got about 15 lbs. per hive of fall 

 honey in September. We have a great many 

 bee-k"eepers in this county. There are more 

 than 1,000 colonies of bees in and within 5 

 miles of town, not including the two or 

 three that almost every farmer keeps. I 

 had one swarm this summer ; now have 94 

 colonies. J. Few Brown. 



Collins, 111., July 21, 1879. 

 The loss of bees in this section has been 

 50 per cent, at least in this vicinity, during 

 the winter and spring. Bee-culture is in a 

 very low or backward state. I am doing all 

 I can to get my neighbors to adopt frame 

 hives of some sort, and am trying to per- 

 suade them to take some kind or bee-litera- 

 ture ; have succeeded in getting some of 

 them to subscribe for the American Bee 

 Journal, which I think is the best author- 

 ity of anything that is published. How is 

 this ? I undertook to Italianize my apiary, 

 and removed all of the drone comb from all 

 of my hives, and have kept it pruned out ; 

 but one of my young queens got fertilized 

 and commenced laying in the nuclei hive, 

 and then was lost or died ; but the bees 

 hatched out the brood and a portion of them 

 were drones, hatched in worker cells and 



among the worker brood. The cells were 

 built out a little longer than the rest. The 

 drones so hatched were as well marked as 

 those from the old queen, but not so large. 

 The young queen must have been fertilized 

 by some of my neighbors' black drones, for 

 I had no drones from my old queen when 

 she was fertilized. Will Italian bees, reared 

 by black bees, be as bright-colored as those 

 reared by Italian bees? I have thought I 

 could notice a difference. 



M. A. Newman. 



[Your young queen was a drone-laying 

 queen, caused either by want of fertilization 

 in time or by injuries received. If a queen 

 has passed too long a period before meeting 

 a drone, the drone eggs are apt to predomi- 

 nate, and when there are no drone cells to 

 deposit those eggs in, why worker cells 

 would be the next in order. The queen was 

 undoubtedly killed and removed by the bees 

 as they would try to supersede her, when 

 her infirmities became known. We think 

 it matters not what bees rear the young 

 ones, if the eggs are from a pure queen.— 

 Ed.] 



Platteville, Wis., July 21, 1879. 

 We had the best show for basswood honey 

 this year that I ever saw ; but who can tell 

 what is coming ? Just as the blossoms 

 were nicely open and ready for the bees we 

 had two all-night rains that washed the 

 honey out clean, so the basswood honey 

 crop was cut short. My bees worked on it 

 only 8 days ; it was done July 11th or 12th. 

 The bees would steal or rob so bad we had 

 to quit. I have the honey from 101 colonies 

 of bees and their increase— 8,200 lbs. so far, 

 mostly extracted ; a little over 80 lbs. to a 

 colony — rather a small yield. But I think 

 we will get some buckwheat honey yet, if 

 the weather is dry. I find that wet weather 

 is bad for honey, the flowers not secreting 

 honey so well, and what we do get is thin. 

 - E. France. 



Greenleaf, Minn., July 18, 1879. 

 I commenced to keep bees last year with 

 3 colonies, and increased by natural swarm- 

 ing to 12 ; lost 1 this spring ; had good luck 

 last year, but this year they act as if they 

 were deranged. There have only 7 new 

 swarms come out, and 5 of these swarmed 

 out when they were 2 days old; the first one 

 clustered and I hived it again, and it stayed 

 all right ; but last Saturday the next one 

 came out and left, and the same day 3 new 

 ones swarmed. We had 1 hived and 2 others 

 came out almost at once, but clustered sep- 

 arately on one tree. We hived them and 

 put them into the bee-yard, and all at once 1 

 swarm left and went into the hive that we 

 hived an hour before ; I divided them, but 

 did not find the queens ; put a frame con- 

 taining eggs in both hives, and they all 

 seemed right till Monday. Sunday morn- 

 ing my swarm that left, or some other one, 

 came back and went into the other one that 

 came out the day before, and Monday they 

 all swarmed out and clustered, and we tried 

 to hive them, but they would get together. 



