1871.] 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



133 



I have still to mention that the queen referred 

 to had supplied fully one-half of the cells of a 

 comb on the fourth of September ; and it was 

 therefore not her fault that the bees had raised 

 no brood. I subsequently re-inti'oduced her to 

 her colony. 



In this locality, bees do not usually stop breed- 

 ing before the end of September, and the queens 

 continue to lay a few eggs even through the 

 month of October. From these the workers will 

 raise queens, if deprived of their queen inten*- 

 tionally or accidentally; and in a number of cases 

 I lost valuable queens, which had been intro- 

 duced and accepted, simply because I neglected 

 to destroy those queen cells. 



A. Grimm. 



Jefferson, October, 1871. 



[For the American Bee Journal.] 



Non-Hatching Eggs. 



Mr. Editor : — Many cases are now reported 

 of queen bees laying eggs that do not hatch. 

 About a dozen such have come under my own 

 observation or actual knowledge. Then, too, 

 other nearly analogous phenomena have been 

 noticed — namely, of non-laying queens. I can 

 report one such case myself. About the middle 

 of August, I came to one of my hives, intending 

 to remove the surplus honey, for extraction by 

 machine ; bvit to my surprise found no brood of 

 any grade, nor any eggs. That hive had given 

 me a natural swarm, but was still well populated, 

 though it soon proved to be queenless. I put in 

 a fertile queen, caged between the combs. Forty- 

 eight hours afterwards I found the queen dead. 

 I then inserted a queen cell, and next day found 

 that cut out and destroyed. The hive was then 

 left in this condition several weeks, when I made 

 a close inspection. The hive was no longer so 

 well populated, but I found a nice yellow queen, 

 bred from hybrid brood, and bearing all the 

 signs of being a prolific queen. Nevertheless I 

 saw not a single egg lu the cells. I killed that 

 queen at once and tried to introduce another, 

 but again without success. 



A few days after this, I opened a strong 

 nucleus, to examine the expected just hatching 

 young bees, as the queen had been marked in duo 

 time as impregnated. But no brood in any 

 stage, nor eggs, could I see. The queen was a 

 splendid looking one, and the workers treated 

 her with the usual tokens of respect. AVhat 

 could have been the matter with her, that she 

 laid no eggs at all ? . A similar case came 

 under the observation of Mr. Adam Grimm. 



The honey season here was cut short by 

 drouth, and little honey was stored after the 

 basswood bloom was over. A few hives filled 

 small boxes with thistle honey. We had no 

 buckwheat blossoms, nor any other fall pastur- 

 age, such as we had last year. 



I am tired of the box honey business as my 

 hundred colonies and their eighty-four swarms 

 yielded me only two thousand (2000) pounds of 

 box honey ; andhadit not been for honey-slingcr 

 aiding me to take four thousand (_4000) pounds 



more of extracted honey from the main hives, 

 I should have had a small harvest. But the 

 bodies of the hives were so filled with honey, that 

 I had to take from fifteen to twenty-five pounds 

 from every hive— still leaving from twenty to 

 twenty five pounds of honey, per hive, for the 

 bees to winter on. 



If the next season prove to be as favorable as 

 the last two were, I shall put the honey-slinger 

 in operation earlier, and thereby double or 

 treble my profits. 



W. Wolf. 



Jeffenon, Wis., Oct. 5, 1871. 



[For the American Bee Journal.] 



How to utilize Wax. 



Beeswax is quoted pretty regularly in tlie 

 price currents, as worth thirty-five to forty 

 cents per pound. This means in large cakes of 

 pure wax weighing several pounds a piece. 



This i^rice would hardly pay a man for the 

 trouble of getting it out, if he had anything else 

 to do. A ton of iron may be worth thirty or 

 forty dollars ; but converted into steel, and made 

 uj) into needles, it would be worth probably 

 $300,000. 



On a small scale, beeswax may be similarly 

 increased in value and made worth much more 

 than forty cents per pound, simply by converting 

 it into small cakes of a size such as every woman 

 wants in her work basket. Looking about the 

 house the other evening for a mould of suitable 

 size, I found a dozen small glass salt cellars, 

 having a cavity about an inch in diameter and 

 three-quarters of an inch deep, which I immedi- 

 ately made use of — casting nearly two hundred 

 small cakes of wax, weighing about sixty to the 

 pound. They would no doubt retail readily at 

 five cents a piece, or three dollars per pound — 

 an advance of six hundred per cent. 



They can be cast and cooled rapidly, and the 

 moulds used over and over again, care being 

 taken to grease them properly before each 

 casting. 



How can a winter's evening be spent more 

 profitably than in making up a few hundred such 

 cakes of beeswax ? 



R. BiCKFORD. 



Seneca Falls, N. ¥., Nov. 1, 1871. 



B>i^i^ We have known beeswax to be thus 

 "utilized" more than twenty years ago, and 

 for the same purpose exactly, though to much 

 greater profit, and by means too of precisely the 

 identical salt cellar moulds. The only differ- 

 ence that we are aware of, consisted in the em- 

 ployment of bleached wax, costing then about 

 eighty cents per j^ound, and the insertion of a 

 splendid suspensory riband in each cake. 

 Though these cakes were then cast either plain 

 white or of various colors, we presume it was the 

 riband "improvement" that added so largely 

 to the commercial value of the much admired 

 little work basket appendage, as made it find a 

 ready market at ten or twelve cents, each ; or 

 at the rate of six or eight dollars per pound. 



