

PiatUsUt Weetd-y at IIS Alichig-aji SIrett 



$1.00 a Vear— SompJe Copy P^ree. 



37th Year. 



CHICAGO, ILL., JUNE 24, 1897. 



No. 25. 



•* Advauced" or 



Progressive " Bee-Keepiug 

 — Drones. 



BY S. A. DEACON. 



" To Dro}ie or vot to Dnnie : that in tfw tju^slioii.^^ 



We have most of us, I think, heard of charlatans and 

 magicians, who — the former with their nostrums and the lat- 

 ter with their enchantments, abracadabras, and their general 

 hocum-pocum — profess the ability to rejuvenate old women 

 and men ; and in some hitherto inaccessible corner of this 

 globe there is said to be a fountain, or well, of perpetual 

 youth. But, without the aid of empiric, wizard or well, our 

 industry — Bee-Keeping — is always seemingly in its infancy, 

 forever " muling and puling in its nurse's arms." 



True, we advance — and so does a crab — in a kind of a way; 

 but our fitful, spasmodic attempts at progress ever bring us 

 back to the position known to statesmen as the statxis quo ante, 

 or, to the drill sergeant as that of " As you were I" We seem, 

 somehow, to get no "forrader," despite all our much-vaunted 

 knowledge and skill. 



Can the term, "Advanced Bee-Keeping," or "Bee-Keep- 



iug by Advanced Methods," be deemed altogether a justifiable 

 or appropriate one-when we hear of veterans — men who are 

 verging on, or have already past, the allotted three-score 

 years and ten — cooking their meals with "modern appli- 

 ances," and going back to a style of hive and system of man- 

 agement which they unhesitatingly affirm they used and 

 adopted more successfully 35 years or more ago? Can we be 

 said to advance, or our progress be deemed other than crablike, 

 when the long-practiced and highly-approved methods of one 

 set of experts are all at once vigorously denounced by another 

 set — as, for instance, in the matter of using drawn combs ia 

 sections — or when such bright apiarists as the late Mr. B. 

 Taylor, pile up their double brood-chamber hives for future 

 use as fire-wood, while Messrs. Ilutchinson and E. L. Taylor 

 cannot praise this style of hive sufficiently high; when Mr. 

 Golden starts teaching us that we are all wrong in placing our 

 surplus receptacles above the brood, and advocates putting 

 them under, thus substituting "subs" for "supers," and 

 adding another word to our already too lengthy technical 

 vocabulary ; and when numbers of e-xperienced bee-men, who, 

 years ago, renounced the use of large hives for the production 

 of comb honey, are showing every disposition to abandon the 

 8-frame hive, and revert to that of 10 ? 



With such divergence of opinion obtaining among the 

 leading lights of our industry on matters of such primary im- 

 portance, no one need allow himself to be deterred from pub- 

 licly airing his opinions, or from offering suggestions, which, 

 opposing fixt ideas, may seem the most outre and absurd im- 

 aginable. He may even suggest the placing of hives on their 

 sides, hinging the doors, and sliding the horizontally-lying 

 frames in and out like so many drawers, and defy the jeers 

 and cynical taunts of his brother apiarists; for that which is 

 ridiculed or scouted as impracticable to-day in our pursuit is 

 eagerly adopted to-morrow, while a device patented and 

 crackt up to the skies one day, serves to boil the kettle the 

 next. 



Thank goodness, there's no such thing as an ^pistical In- 

 quisition, as there once was a Pa;ji.stical one ; or, if there 

 were, and with either Dr. Miller, Mr. Doolittle, or the Rev. E. 

 T. Abbott in Torqr.emada's chair, I greatly fear that my 

 days, like my hives, would be numbered, for the monstrously 

 heretical, amazingly and daringly unorthodox suggestion, or 

 interrogatory, which I am about to place before your readers, 

 and which to save their nerves from too sudden and violent a 

 shock, I have preluded with the above jeremiad, or burden of 

 complaint. 



And now to the point — be the consequences what they 

 may ! Are the majority of our most Intelligent, most obser- 

 vant and most experienced bee-keepers thoroughly convinced 

 that they are standing on firm ground la concluding that the 

 suppression of drones, either by trapping, cutting out drone- 

 comb and otherwise ensuring that there shall be only worker- 



