THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW. 



85 



— in case it can be kept from swarm- 

 ing any more. 



Mc Evoy says, don't buy combs from an 

 apiary where the bees have all died out. 

 Buy foundation instead. A. B. J., 50. 



Dr. Gallup says he lost five queen cells 

 out of eight last summer in the West vdre 

 protector. Too much cold metal for Cal- 

 ifornia cool nights. Saw Wellhausen use 

 cell protectors in the long, long, ago, be- 

 fore frame hives came. Those protectors 

 were made of hollow milkweed stems, 

 and woiddn't chill the babies inside. A. 

 B. J., 50. In some things we ma}- not have 

 gotten ahead as far as we think we have. 

 A. B. J., on page 51, starts the plan of 

 having half a dozen of the question 

 respondents go over some point of a ques- 

 tion again at greater length, in reply to a 

 correspondent who don't feel satisfied 

 yet. Good idea. 



My fondness for guessing gets the start 

 of me again. A (juestioner, A. B. J., 54, 

 wants to know why more runaway swarms 

 go west than other directions. ( Hardl}' 

 true at my apiary. ) Dr. Miller rather 

 thinks it is so, but gives up. Well, one 

 of the passible causes of running away is 

 scant forage at home coupled with a smell 

 of abundance coming on the breezes. 

 Now it stands to reason that even bees 

 can't smell dinner seven miles, or three 

 miles, against the wind. As our prevail- 

 ing wind is west, the larger share of 

 swarms that f\.^s^r\. from that cause ^\\\ go 

 west. 



The Northweslerners think that (jueens 

 reared in cells hanging down from the 

 bottom of the comb are not quite so apt 

 to be good ones as when reared up in the 

 center of the colony. Not always im- 

 mersed in bees cool nights, and sometimes 

 chilled to death outright. A. B. J., 58. 

 Friend Golden has a new section clean- 

 ing machine in which sand paper on a 

 horizontally revolving disc does the work 

 — apparently quite an improvement on 

 previous machines. I suspect that really 

 the right way to proceed is to first take 

 off the propolis with the khife, and then 

 take off the staiii with the machine. 



C. P. Dadant goes Dr. Miller two bet- 

 ter, and figures out a profit of seven dol- 

 lars a day for bee-keepers' work^and that 

 not an occasional season but on the av- 

 erage. A. B. J., 33. If that is so some of 

 us had better be letting our apiaries out 

 at the halves. 



Even veteran bee-keepers do not always 

 find estimates and actual weights to cor- 

 respond. C. Davenport confesses to go- 

 ing over a yard in mid season to decide 

 how much honey was then in the supers. 

 He did this for a prospective purchaser, 

 and both set figures; one at 2,500 pounds 

 and the other at 2,100. And the whole 

 crop at the end of the season was aiout 

 1,300. This is made to do ser\'ice against 

 the journalistic enterprise of getting early 

 reports of what the year's crop is going to 

 be. A. B. J., 35. 



The limb of a tree in George S. Wheel- 

 er's yard was ( it is alleged ) the resting 

 place of hundreds of swarms, and always 

 at the same place on the limb. A. B. J., 

 17. I can't quite see that fly, but I can 

 hear it step — in this fashion. One single 

 tree, of the numerous trees around m}- 

 apiary, has the habit of catching about 

 half of the entire multitude of swarms — 

 that is for frecpient and considerable 

 spells of time. Sometimes nearly all go 

 elsewhere for quite awhile. 



On page 22, .-\. B. J., Dr. Miller says — 

 " If there is not enough pollen floating in 

 honey to start the queen laj'ing in the 

 spring. " I think if he will take a micro- 

 scope and examine different samples of 

 honey until he has found even one 

 single grain of pollen he will thence- 

 forth discontinue that strain of speech. 

 I once started out to familiarize myself 

 with all the diff'erent species of pollen 

 usually involved, in order that I might 

 tell by a glance in the microscope the 

 origin of au}^ sample of honey — as to 

 whether clover, or mixed, or golden rod, 

 or sumach, or what not. After spending 

 much time and a good many dollars of 

 money I concluded I had been awfully 

 fooled by current bee-keepers' lan- 

 guage ( like the above) not founded on 



