248 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



[May, 



for numbers or quantity of bees I had no aprehen- 

 sion of failure. On the seventh of March, with the 

 thei mometer 50° they enjoyed a good hum, and on 

 examination I found brood on three cards (5x8 inches 

 square, the bees quite evidently considerably strong- 

 er than when put in winter quarters, and no more 

 dead bees than in any of the others, four or five of 

 which had not as much brood as these. 



They had the least dead bees, and the most brood 

 under way I ever had the good fortune to witness in 

 four years, after five months confinement. The 

 greatest drawback the winter before, as I believe 

 now was the want of bee-bread of which they have 

 abundance now, kept the bees from breeding early. 

 In fact I never found bees the middle of March with- 

 out bread except last year, which accounts for bees 

 having died in the month of May, when apparently 

 all right before that. Consequently I had great 

 trouble to save mine, not an old bee I had left by 

 the fifteenth of May. My Italian showed this, 

 having a queen introduced in October previous. 



C. Wurster. 



[For the American Bee Journal.] 



Cheap Hives, or Simplicity Simplified. 



Me. Editor. — You can buy a steam engine for a 

 dollar, or else newspaper advertisements are unre- 

 liable. You can buy a printiDg press for a dollar, 

 or else the advertiser is a deceiver. Now why 

 don't you invest two dollars, get both, and do your 

 own printing? You could make it very profitable 

 to do so, and could afford to reduce the price of the 

 Journal to about seventy-five cents a year. I am 

 not joking, for I see those articles advertised at 

 those prices. There used to be a man in your city 

 who sold microscopes at twenty-five cents each, and 

 paid the freight on them. You can now buy a 

 sewing machine for five dollars, that will sew any 

 kind of seams, hem, fell, tuck, gather, work button 

 holes, and do anything else that a one hundred 

 dollar machine will do, on any kind of material, 

 from mosquito bar to leather, shingles or tin ; with- 

 out cogs, bands or any little wheels to get out of 

 order, and any child, three years old, can run it. 

 That is what the advertisements say. 



Now, after you supply yourself with all these 

 conveniences, I would suggest that you go into 

 another little speculation, for you have been, no 

 doubt, keeping your bees in very expensive hives. 



You have been using hives, that the frames alone, 

 cost you nearly as much as a steam engine, and 

 have gone to as much expense in painting one of 

 them as would buy a microscope, You have also 

 been so extravagant as to invest another microscope 

 in a quilt honey board. You have done another 

 foolish thing or two, for you spent 10 cents for a 

 door strip for your bees to walk up on, 40 cents for 

 tin corners to your frames, 10 cents for metal rab- 

 bets to hang the frames on, and even wasted some 

 nails and spent as much as 35 cents in work in 

 putting all together. When you sum all these up, 

 you will find that you have invested a printing 

 press, in addition to the steam engine and the 

 microscopes. You have also been using a two story 

 hive, when it only takes one to make a hive, and 

 have been paying for "the lumber cut ready to 

 nail " 90 cents for each story. In all you have 



spent on a single hive almost enough to pay for one 

 of those unequalled sewing machines, and if you 

 would buy the sewing machines "in large quan- 

 tities," like some bee keepers buy their lumber, 

 you could no doubt get two sewing machines for 

 what you have been paying for a single hive. 



Now would it not be better for you to buy the 

 " Simplicity Hive" advertised in your Journal? It 

 just costs the same amount of money that one of 

 those first class steam engines or printing presses 

 costs, and is equally "simple" in construction. It 

 is like the $5.00 sewing machine. It has no cogs, 

 bands, or little wheels to be getting out of order. 

 It has no frames to be getting twisted around cat- 

 teraivampus, and bothering a fellow, so that he will 

 have to go to the expese of getting metal corners to 

 stay them. It has no bottom board to harbor moth 

 worms. It has no honey boards, quilts, pillow cases, 

 nor door steps to it. Why,. sir, it is the perfection 

 of "simplicity." It is splendidly "simple." 

 Besides all that, it is not gaumed over with your 

 nasty paint. It is the clean, virgin wood, and the 

 great beauty of it is, that a very small child or two 

 can manage it as easily as they can that sewing ma- 

 chine. Yours in 



Sim Plicitt. 



P. S. I forgot to say, that you can save $10.00 

 on each hive by not putting any bees in it, and that 

 will buy four steam engines and six printing presses, 

 or if you have two wives will buy each one a sewing 

 machine. Sim P. 



Nota Bcna. You need not be bothered with this 

 terrible bee disease, for if you don't put bees in the 

 hive, they won't die with it. 



S. Plicity. 



P. S. N. B. If you don't think this too much 

 like an advertisement for the "$1.00 store," I 

 would like for you to publish it, for the benefit of 

 your "simple" subscribers. S. P. 



Addenda. I have some notion to go into the man- 

 ufacture of the "Simplicity" Bee Hive on a large 

 scale. With a four hundred dollar wind-mill, eleva- 

 ted on a tower 55^ feet high, I think that I can get 

 power enough to make bee hives for the whole 

 world. In order to bring them within the reach of 

 all, I propose simplifying the "simplicity" hive by 

 leaving off the sides and top, and selling them at 

 a nickel a piece, or in large lots, at a dollar per 

 hundred, and I will recommend in the next number 

 of my paper, " The Cleanings out of Bee Culture," 

 that the sawdust pile be dispensed with, as there is 

 danger of fire, or if it is used, I will advise the pur- 

 chase of a fire extinguisher, to be on hand in case 

 of conflagrations, and as a good thing to settle bees. 



Simeon Plicity. 



The Old Bee Theory. 



In a late number of the Journal, J. W. Hosmer 

 says, he thinks the great loss of bees during the 

 winter of 1872, was caused by too many old, and a 

 want of young bees. I have to say, that I do not 

 believe it. If so, why did stocks which worked all 

 through September and half of October, and carried 

 on breeding until the middle of November, and went 

 into, winter quarters, strong in numbers, and these 

 nearly all young bees, nearly all die ; while two 



