June 21, 1906 



537 



American Ttee Journal 



one, and by following this method you get enormous swarms. 

 I get, with a io- frame Langstroth, 4 stories full of bees by 

 June 17, and not one of those colonies ever yet cast a swarm. 

 And while others are not getting a pound of surplus in my 

 locality, they yield me 200 pounds of comb or extracted. 



I can endorse what has been said about ventilation. You 

 need considerable of it. For extracted honey, upward ven- 

 tilation with a hole at the back of each side about J<J of an 

 inch is a good thing. It will keep them from clustering on 

 the outside. I had one swarm at one time 5 stories high, 

 and it v rammed lull of bees at night so that they had a 



cluster as big as the size of a hat; there would be half a 

 bushel on the outside. That swarm of bees filled 5 stories 

 full of honey in 7 days, except the, brood-nest. Three or four 

 manipulations are practically all that is necessary up to the 

 time of the honey-flow, and yet will entirely control swarm- 

 ing. 



Pres. Dadant — In how many colonies did you try this? 

 Mr. Ferris — I had 25. 



Mr. Rice — When you remove the queens and division- 

 boards do you unite them? 



Mr. Ferris — Yes. At the end of the flow I supply them 

 with another queen besides the one they have. 



Mr. Rice — What do you do with the old queens? 

 Mr. Ferris — I kill them. I have no use for queens 

 that are over a year old. 



Dr. Miller— You consider this practical, uniting two colo- 

 nies? 



Mr. Ferris — Yes. But really you only have one to deal 

 with all the way through. 



Mr. Baxter — I would like to be understood on this mat- 

 ter of ventilation. I have holes at the back of my hives also, 

 but then that is simply to ventilate around the super and the 

 top of the super. There is no draught from the lower part 

 of the hive through the hive and out through this hole. I 

 have an oilcloth over it which makes it perfectly tight. If 

 there happens to be a hole in the cloth the bees will not store 

 honey near that hole. You can see from that it is a detri- 

 ment to have a draught through the supers. But I do believe 

 in having ventilation around and from below. 



Mr. Holtermann — I want to say, most emphatically, I 

 have got at least 300 of these ventilators, only I think I have 

 a better way than to bore a hole of that size. I have an 

 opening of about f£ of an inch in depth right across the hive. 

 I have no difficulty whatever in having the bees store honey 

 next to these ventilators. 



Pres. Dadant — It is a fact that where there is a hole in 

 the oilcloth, even if there is a straw mat such as we use 

 on top of the frames, there is a slight amount of ventilation 

 there, and the bees put less honey at that spot. 



Mr. Ferris — Bees that are queenless will go into the 

 supers quicker than bees that have a queen. That is one 

 Teason why I advocate taking away the queens at this period, 

 at the commencement of the honey-flow. You can control 

 swarming at the commencement by giving the queen room 

 to lay. But after the honey-flow commences they will enter 

 the honey-sections more readily if they are queenless for the 

 first 3 or 4 days than they will if they have a queen. I use 

 no more bees to winter than you would winter ordinarily in 

 a 10-frame hive. 



Mr. McEvoy — Did I understand this gentleman to say 

 that he uses 14 frames in a brood chamber, and the brood 

 is all in the brood-chamber, and an excluder on? 



Mr. Ferris — I always confine the queen below. In our 

 locality we will have all the lower frames filled with pollen. 

 I have seen it time after time ; if we allow our queens to 

 run at random through the hive without an excluder, they 

 will store the first story full of pollen ; the next will be a 

 brood nest, and the honey on top of all. 



Mr. McEvoy — I see by the papers that they all advocate 

 large brood-chambers. I have only a medium-size, and yet 

 I rear more brood than the most of them, because I go in, 

 as a rule, for pretty near 18 frames. I put the queen above, 

 and then I clip off at certain periods, and I leave that brood 

 afterwards, and in 9 days it is capped. I let them swarm 

 and come out with an immense lot of bees. From my point 

 of view I don't want too much super-room, because I can 

 get better ripened honey, and a finer quality, and less swarms. 

 Mr. Ferris — I get 30 frames of brood instead of 18 by 

 June 15 to June 18. 



Mr. McEvoy — I understand you to have had the 14 

 frames just below ? 



Mr. Ferris — No, I keep tiering them up until the flow 

 begins; I let the queen have full range until the flow. 



Mr. McEvoy— All right. I agree with you. That is the 

 best thing I have heard yet. 



Mr. Bartz — It is not advisable to mix the two matters, 

 comb and extracted honey, the way you are doing. They are 

 different matters, and require different treatment. I would 

 like if each method were treated separately. Most bee-keep- 

 ers can control increase when running for extracted honey, 

 but the difficulty seems to be with comb honey. 



Mr. Taylor — The trouble, I think, is that these people 

 who control swarming are producing extracted honey, and 

 those who produce comb honey cannot control swarming. 

 That is the reason they don't discuss it so much. 



Mr. Ferris — There is a question I want to ask. Take 

 these supers, no matter what size section we use, and ex- 

 tracting frames, so that you can put an extracting frame 

 all drawn out with nice white comb in it on the outside of 

 each side of the super, and in these large cases put one in the 

 middle. When you put that on, the outside will be filled first 

 instead of the center of the hive, and then the super will be 

 capped more evenly all over. Are there others trying that 

 method in different localities? 



Mr. McEvoy — Yes; that will work in all localities. 

 Mr. Ferris — We know our poorest sections are almost 

 invariably on the outside of the super, and by getting those 

 capped first we produce a small quantity of extracted honey 

 and the bulk of it in comb. 



Mr. Jackson — When you have both your queens in the 

 bottom brood-chamber and allow them full range, how do you 

 keep them apart? If your brood-frames drop, can they get 

 together ? 



Mr. Ferris — My 10-frame hive has a solid partition that 

 goes clear to the bottom, and they meet, so that when I put 

 the one story on top of the other the division-boards sit tight, 

 and I lay a cloth over the top. 



Mr. Hatch — I think we are losing sight of one point 

 mentioned here, the influence of drones in casting swarms. 

 In my observation a colony will never cast a swarm unless 

 there are some drones present. Another idea was, we should 

 look for drone-comb as well as queen-cups. I know one 

 of the most sucessful bee-keepers that uses small hives, 12 

 inches square and 7 inches deep. He starts in the spring 

 with one section and then puts on another section. He is 

 very careful to have nothing but worker-comb in any of his 

 frames. As the honey season advances he goes and pries 

 the top hive off and he says, "There is some drone-comb; 

 they are preparing for swarming." He scrapes that off 

 and puts an empty section between them, and they are 

 fixed for 10 days; that colony won't swarm. He didn't look 

 for queen-cells. 



Swarming is an indication of vigor, and strength, and 

 power. The point is not to stop that, but to turn it in the 

 right direction. Just merely controlling increase is not 

 what we are after. We want to control it in such a way 

 that we shall not lose our honey crop, or diminish it. I 

 have tried a good many ways, and I have never yet found 

 one solitary way that was controlling the increase but what 

 was at the expense of the honey. I have tried the plan of 

 caging the queen on 2 frames and she will sulk, and wear 

 herself to death, and when you release her again it will 

 only be a few days before she will be superseded. I have 

 tried shaking the bees off onto comb, and onto full founda- 

 tion, but with the same result. I would rather pay a man 

 $5.00 a day to sit in my apiary and watch for swarms and 

 hive them, than to try any plan of controlling increase that 

 I have discovered yet. 



Mr. Holtermann — I very emphatically oppose any method 

 which forces the bees not to swarm. As Mr. Hatch has said, 

 direct their energies in the direction of producing honey. 



Mr. Hatch — Do you think it is possible for a colony 

 to swarm without any drones being present in the hive? 

 Mr. Bratz — I have had them swarm without. 

 Mr. Holtermann — I don't think that any man is in a po- 

 sition to say that there is actually not a drone present in the 

 hive. 



Mr. Hershiser— I have had bees swarm quite frequently 

 without drones when I set them out in the spring. 



Mr. Aspinwall — I received a challenge from Mr. Taylor 

 just now, that we hadn't heard from the comb-honey man. 

 But as I am set down for a talk on the non-swarming hive 

 I thought it best not to say anything. I am working on a 



