170 



THE AMERICAN BEE KEEPER. 



June 



honey buy it in the comb. Stories 

 have gone floating around about the 

 making of artificial comb and filling 

 it with make-believe honey, but they 

 are lies. Man is clever, but he has 

 not yet been able to duplicate the 

 work of the bee in honey and comb 

 making. The nearest he comes to it 

 is making an artificial base upon 

 which the bees begin their work of 

 cell making, and even this has to be 

 made of pure beeswax, or the bees 

 will have nothing to do with it." 



Then he told how this artificial 

 base of wax was made and used. In 

 each of the little boxes of comb honey 

 which one buys will be found approx- 

 imately a pound of honey. It is held 

 in two sets of cells which are built 

 upon a foundation that runs through 

 the centre of the glass faced box. 

 Pressed between dies, the beeswax is 

 poured into this foundation with just 

 the beginnings of cells showing on 

 each side, and this the bee-keeper ce- 

 ments with other wax in each box to 

 save his bees work. It has been esti- 

 mated that it takes a consumption of 

 thirty pounds of honey by the wax 

 making bees of a hive to enable them 

 to produce one pound of wax. So, 

 for every pound of wax that the bee- 

 keeper saves them from making, he 

 reaps a heavy return in honey. 



The great producers of strained 

 honey take a further and very inter- 

 esting advantage of this fact. As soon 

 as a frame is filled with honey and 

 sealed over, they take it away, slice 

 the tops off the cells, put the frame 

 into a centrifugal wheel where the 

 honey is all drained out as the wheel 

 revolves and then put the emptied 

 comb back for the bees to refill the 

 cells and recap them. This makes so 



enormous an increase in the honey 

 production of the bees that strained 

 honey is quoted in the wholesale mar- 

 kets in this city at from 5 to 7 cents 

 a pound, while honey in the comb is 

 quoted at from 9 to 12 cents. Bees- 

 wax is worth about 27 cents a pound. 



"California is now the largest 

 honey producing State in the Union 

 and perhaps in the world," said a 

 member of one of the best known 

 firms in this city dealing in honey 

 alone, "and the great honey region of 

 California is in the four extreme 

 southern counties, San Diego, River- 

 side, Los Angeles and Ventura. One 

 single bee-keeper there has produced 

 from 80,000 to 100,000 pounds of 

 honey in a season, and in the great 

 honey year of 1895 San Diego county 

 alone shipped about 200 carloads of 

 honey. Ninety per cent of the Cali- 

 fornia honey is sent to market 

 strained and it is shipped in cans 

 which hold five gallons or sixty 

 pounds of honey, and two cans are 

 packed together in a case. Last year 

 was a bad one for blossoms, and San 

 Diego hardly shipped ten car loads of 

 honey. Plenty of rain in the late 

 winter and spring and even weather 

 in May and June make honey gather- 

 ing possible, for the bees of southern 

 California gather their sweets mostly 

 from the white sage and sumach blos- 

 soms. Up in the San Joaquin valley 

 they depend upon the alfalfa clover. 



"New" York comes next to Califor- 

 nia in production, and here the main 

 part of the honey is sent to the mar- 

 ket in the comb. Albany, Schoharie 

 and Schenectady counties produce a 

 great quantity, principally from buck- 

 wheat blossoms. There are many 

 bee-keepers through the Mohawk 



