THE AMERICAN APICULTURIST. 



bees as lively as in June and their 

 stores largely consumed, and then 

 look into one wintered on pure 

 sugar syrup with the bees knotted 

 together in a drowsy mass and their 

 stores almost untouched. 



But of course this marked differ- 

 ence does not always appear. The 

 excitement of bees is always tem- 

 pered by the difficulty of getting 

 a load of honey after they have 

 once reached it. You may expose 

 well capped honey in your apiary 

 in July with impunity, when ex- 

 tracted honey so exposed would 

 cause an uproar. And right here 

 1 believe is one great advantage in 

 having hone_y for winter stores 

 well ripened and thoroughly capped. 

 Even bees cannot get up much en- 

 thusiasm over honey as thick as 

 tar in winter capped as with sheets 

 of flat-bottomed foundation. Every 

 bee-master will recognize this as 

 being about the character stored in 

 June and kept in the brood-cham- 

 ber till autumn. Hence one rea- 

 son for the superiority of early 

 stored honej', and when there is 

 enough of such honey in store, it 

 is folly to extract it for the purpose 

 of feeding sugar. With a little care, 

 enough of such honey may be had 

 nearly always in every part of the 

 country more cheaply than sugar 

 stores can be supplied, and ma^' be 

 used with reasonable assurance of 

 safe wintering. 



So when we consider that safe 

 honey stores may be generally 

 cheaply secured, the serious incon- 

 venience of feeding bees after stor- 

 ing has ceased in the fall, the 

 greater or less depletion which the 

 colony undergoes in the operation, 

 the consequent injury to the honej' 

 market, the susi)icions of adultera- 

 tion excited, and the unpleasant- 

 ness there is in expending the 

 amount necessary for the purchase 

 of sugar, when there is plenty of 

 honey on hand seeking a market, 



must, I think, always make the use 

 of sugar for winter stores unpopu- 

 lar and exceptional. 

 La-peer, Mich. 



For the American Apiculturist . 



CAN THE COST OF HONE 7 



PRODUCTION BE 



LESSENED? 



G. M. DOOLITTLE. 



When I first began keeping bees, 

 the average price of comb honey 

 was about 25 cents per pound in 

 ordinary seasons; while in a very 

 poor season like 1869, when but 

 very little found its way into mar- 

 ket, the enormous price of 50 cents 

 was paid, or, at least that was the 

 price offered me by a speculator for 

 the little I had in that year. In 

 1873 the price advanced from the 

 average, so that with good crops, 

 I obtained an average of 274- cents 

 per pound for my honey that 3'ear 

 and the two following. At the 

 same time I readily sold extracted 

 honey by the barrel of 500 pounds 

 at 15 and 16 cents per pound. 

 These were '•'■jolly" times for bee- 

 keepers and to see what my real 

 profits were, over the cost of pro- 

 duction,! kept an itemized account 

 for one year, charging good wages 

 for myself in addition to all other 

 expenses. I now took m}^ average 

 yield for a term of years as a basis 

 of the production from a single 

 colony, then multiplied it by the 

 number of colonies (100) I be- 

 lieved I could care for without 

 hired help, thus getting the pro- 

 duction of the whole. The total 

 expenses were now divided by the 

 average total production to find 

 the actual cost of producing one 

 pound of honey. This proved to 

 be 15 cents for comb honey and 

 10 cents for extracted honey or 



