1872.] 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



259 



"We invite beekeepers to use barley liquor 

 for bee food and report their success. In the 

 second fortnioht of February I began to give 

 this stimulating food to six colonies. The bees 

 accepted it, although I gave it pure, but took 

 it vpitli greater avidity after a little honey was 

 mixed with it. They left no residue, not even 

 the mealy part with which the decoction was 

 saturated. The barley {malt) arrives from Ger- 

 many already germinated, and costs at the 

 brewery a little over sixteen cents a gallon. The 

 decoction mu.st not be prepared more than four 

 or five days in advance, or it might sour. Four 

 or five gallons of juice are obtained from a gal- 

 lon of the germinated barley, by boiling it in 

 water two hours, and adding a little honey. 

 This stimulating and economical food has the 

 advantage of not attracting robbers, The 

 feeders should be cleaned (scalded) every four 

 or five days." 



A propos to the transmutation of sweet sub- 

 stances into honey, the Rev. .Jesuit Babaz pub- 

 lished a book in France, in 18()9, in which he de- 

 scribed his method of feeding sugared water to 

 bees to be transformed into honey. By scenting 

 the feed with vanilla or other aromatics, he suc- 

 ceeds in producing honey of diiferent sorts ; but 

 he hopes for a decrease in the price of sugar to 

 make this industry a pai,ing business ! 



My opinion is that the surest and best method 

 of producing honey is to take good care of the 

 bees, that tiiey may be able to gather the mil- 

 lions of pounds of honey now wasted. 



Cn. Dadant. 



[For the American Bee Journal.] 



Me. Editor : — In the January number of the 

 Bee Journal, Mr. Gallup gives the dimensions 

 of his hive, and tells the amount of honey pro- 

 duced by a single colony of bees. Also of the 

 wonderful prolificness of Ma queens, and winds 

 up by saying, " Let the donkeys hrdyT 



As none of them have brayed, I presume they 

 think of " Oallup,^'' as the old Dutchman, "who 

 was breaking a colt, " did of his aon, whom he 

 liad placed in the bush to bih at the colt, to 

 cure him of being srarey. The boy did hah, and 

 the colt upset the Dutchman, and run away. 

 "Ah!' says the Dutchman, '■'• you bah too lout.'''' 

 Now, old donkey, don't bah so loud next time. 



Then in the April number, he says: "Mr. 

 Furman stated at the beekeei)ers' convention, 

 that he did not believe such statements, and tliat 

 they were false," etc. Now, I suppose Mr. Gal- 

 lup says this to draw me out, as he did one of 

 the writers of the National Bee Journal. I hope 

 friend Gallup will not be off"ended because I 

 spoke my mind at the convention. I based my 

 sayings on figures. He says in the January 

 number of the American Bee Journal, also in 

 the Iowa Homestead, of Janury 12th, that his 

 wonderfully prolific queens occupied over four 

 thousand cubic inches with brood. (I suppose 

 she was trying to spread herself from Maine to 

 Oregon. ) Brood-comb being only seven-eighths 

 of an inch thick, there must be four thousand 



five hundred square inches of comb ; and as 

 there are fifty cells to every square inch of comb, 

 giving two hundred and twenty-five thousand 

 cells. As it takes twenty-one days for the 

 worker brood to hatch, by dividing two hundred 

 and twenty-five thousand by twenty-one, it gives 

 us about ten thousand seven hundred and four- 

 teen, the number of eggs that must be laid in 

 each successive day. Now. is this not pretty 

 lively work for a queen to examine each cell and 

 lay nearly eleven thousand Q^,s.fi in one day ? 

 D"es she not need some time to eat and rest? 

 Will she not take one-half of the time"? If she 

 does, she has to lay about two and a half eggs 

 every second. Oh ! Gallup, how I would like to 

 have that queen under my glass for a few sec- 

 onds, to see her turn somersaults. And where 

 do you leave poor Mitchell, who says he can 

 make one hundred swarms from one in a season ? 

 Langstroth says t\^enty thousand bees is a good 

 swarm. Some European writers estimate that 

 from .seventy to one hundred tliousand eggs are 

 laid in one season, but Gallup's queen lays 

 two hundred and twenty-five thousand eggs in 

 twenty-one days, or ten thousand seven hundred 

 and fourteen in one day, making a large swarm 

 every two days, saying nothing about what he 

 had over four thousand cubic inches. I wish 

 that I was mathematician enough to figure up 

 to-iii'/ht the number of swarms he could produce 

 in one season with such a queen. suj>posing her 

 daughters to be equally prolific. He said in 

 his letter to the Editress of the Homestead, that 

 he expected some would say that lie lied. I 

 judged of the truth of his assertions by figures, 

 and will leave the readers to judge for them- 

 selves. 



As to the amount of honey his colony pro- 

 duced, it leaves a poor chance for figures. I did 

 say I did not believe it, and I do not believe it yet. 

 If he will convince me that a queen can lay 

 eleven thousand eggs a day for twenty-one days 

 in succession, I will grant that they can gather 

 six hundred pounds in thirty days. As he said 

 in the Homestead, they did gather twenty 

 pounds a day for thirty days in snccession, then 

 he had to stop to go to harvsting his grain, 

 (what a pity he could not have got some poor 

 fellow to have taken his place in the harvest 

 field, and let him stay by his honey, for who 

 knows what a yield he might have taken?) One 

 of his hives lost its queen during this great 

 yield of honey, so the product was small. My 

 experience has been, tliat by t;iking the queen 

 away just before the honey harvest, they will 

 i produce a larger yield instead of a smaller one. 

 To sulistantiate his assertions in regard to his 

 big yield of honey, he goes on in the April 

 number of the American Bee Journal, and gives 

 us an idea (a small one I suppose) of the amount 

 of honey in his section, by comparing the bass- 

 wood trees to "blossoms dipped in liquid honey 

 and hung up to drip." It I had been in his 

 place, I would have made sap troughs and placed 

 under the trees, and run the honey right into 

 barrels, and if I couldn't have got barrels, I 

 would have run it into my well and cistern, and 

 if they got full, I would have dug more holes 

 in the giound for the honey. As necessity is 



