280 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



perience than I had ever learned by read- 

 injf, if I ever became a successful apiarist. 



One fall I had thirty stocks of black 

 bees, and not having a cellar to winter 

 them in, I concluded to bury them, as I 

 had read considerable in favor of it. I 

 duff my pits long enough to hold from 

 tliree or four to ten stocks each, and wide 

 and deep enough to pack under and 

 around and between them with corn 

 stalks, and over them with straw, and 

 then have the tops of them just below the 

 surface of the ground. 1 then covered 

 them with six or eight inches of earth, as 

 near as I could guess. My hives were of 

 vaiiiius kinds — movable-comb and some 

 box iiives — in most of which I had made 

 laruc openings in the tops for obtaining 

 box lK)ney. The box hives I placed in 

 an upright position, except one or two 

 that I laid on the side. 



Tlie movable-comb hives I placed in an 

 upright position with the caps ofi', and 

 put I he straw on the frames. Before I 

 put iliem in the pits I depopulated seven- 

 teen (17) of them, according to Mr. Hos- 

 mer's plan. I buried the thirty stocks 

 witli the full expectation that I would 

 take out thirty all right in the spring; 

 but during the winter I became somewhat 

 uneasy about them — perhaps occasioned 

 by something I had read — and wrote to 

 JVir. llosmer and told him how I had 

 managed m}' bees, and asked him what 

 he thought about them. In reply he said, 

 They are, in my opinion, all right. I 

 then rested easy about them until I took 

 them out in March, when, to my sad dis- 

 appointment, I found seven stocks dead; 

 the other twenty-three varied from a hand- 

 full of live bees to a full stock in good 

 condition. Of the -seven that were dead, 

 some of them were very wet, while others 

 were dry as dust. The stocks that were 

 depopulated came through by far the best, 

 on an average, though one box hive lying 

 on its side, came through best of all, and 

 it was the only one that I considered in 

 first-class condition. Quite a number of 

 them that were not depopulated were 

 nearly destroyed by the moth-worms, it 

 being warm enough in the pits to keep 

 them breeding all winter. 



Almost immediately after I got my bees 

 out of the pits they began dwindling 

 away, and I kept losing and doubling up 

 stocks, until the honey season came on, 

 when I had but five stocks left, all in the 

 Star movable-comb hives — having trans- 

 ferred my box hives — but two of which 

 got strong enough to swarm that summer. 

 I then depended on natural swarming, 

 which is a thing of the past with me now. 

 I now have mostly Italians, and get large 

 yields of honey and a good increase of 

 stocks, and consider them far superior to 

 the native bees. S. K. Marsh. 



Ionia CO., Mich. 



For the American Bee Journal. 

 What is Honey? 



In the November number of The Ameri- 

 can Bee Journal, page 262, Mr. Fother- 

 ingham diflers with me in regard to 

 lioney. Our apparent difierence of opin- 

 ion is only a misconstruction of the sen- 

 tence. I agree with him that honey is a 

 saccharine matter to which is added cer- 

 tain substances, whose flavor indicates 

 from what it is derived. Hence, we may 

 say : All saccharine matter that has passed 

 through the sac of the bee, is honey; but 

 the quality is determined solely by the 

 source from which it is derived. We 

 have, therefore, white clover, white sage, 

 fruit blossom, locust, buckwheat, catnip 

 honey, etc. White clover honey, because 

 the saccharine matter was collected by the 

 bees from white clover blossoms, and so 

 of the other varieties. 



If we feed our bees with sugar syrup 

 and the}' deposit it in their cells, that 

 deposit might be called honey, also; be- 

 cause it passed through the honey sac of 

 the bee, and had imparted to it the acid 

 peculiar' to honey. We should perhaps 

 call it " cane sugar honey." But I claim 

 that it is not as good as white clover 

 honey. Were I to buy it, I should only 

 pay the lowest figure for it. 



We cultivate a taste for a certain kind 

 of cottee or tea, and I suppose the same 

 rule holds good in regard to honey. In 

 our wliite clover countrj', for instance, I 

 find that white clover lione^^ is the article 

 preferred, while I am told by friends that 

 in Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minne- 

 sota, bass-wood honey has the best reputa- 

 tion there. 



I think it was the Rev. L. L. Langstroth, 

 our teacher and benefactor, who first 

 advanced the idea that bee poison pro- 

 duced colic in some persons. This bee 

 poison is seen on the stinger of every bee 

 when irritated, snd shines still, on the 

 comb, after the stinger has disappeared. 

 If introduced into our skin it produces 

 swelling; and if eaten, although in a dry 

 state and unobserved, it produces colic. 

 This poison, drying up on the comb and 

 adhering to it, is very likely the cause 

 why persons are not so afiected when eat- 

 ing machine-extracted honey. It is gen- 

 erally hard to persuade a person, once 

 prejudiced to the use of honey, to give 

 the matter a fair test. But in several 

 instances wliere this matter came under 

 my observation, I found it correct. 



Many of my friends, when ofl"ering 

 honey, will assure me thai their honey 

 was well ripened and capped before 

 extracted. To all such I say, that when I 

 buy their lioney, it matters not whether it 

 was capped or ripened before extracted or 

 not. It is of much more importance to 

 know that the honey is clover, buckwheat 

 or bass-wood honey, or whatever else it 



