1897. 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



795 



you reduce to one hive for the winter, or do you winter the two 

 as one hive ? 



3. In making honey-vinegar Id an open crock should the 

 scum, etc., that rises to the top, be skimmed off ? Penn. 



Answers. — 1. Altho not the usual thing. It may happen 

 in a good many cases. At that time some colonies, at least, 

 are without brood, and if there is free communication it would 

 be nothing strange for the whole family to move their quar- 

 ters. 



2. I like a second story placed under in the spring and 

 left till time to put on supers. When supers are taken off, the 

 second story below is useful to prevent the possibility of hav- 

 ing the queen crowded out. When all gathering is over, then 

 the lower story is taken away so as to be lighter for moving, 

 and to take up less room iu cellar. If I wintered my bees 

 outdoors (as I have done experimentally in a few cases) I 

 should h61d to the two stories all the year round except when 

 supers were on. In a few cases I have tri^sd leaving the two 

 stories all the time even when supers were on, but it has not 

 proved satisfactory. Possibly it might if 1 knew better how 

 to manage. 



3. I don't know of any harm the scum will do until the 

 vinegar comes to be used, when of course it must be removed. 



BEEDDM BOILED DOWN. 



Prospect for Next Crop.— Pears are exprest in Glean- 

 ings that the drouth that prevailed so generally may have 

 killed outright a good deal of the white clover. 



Effect of Frequent Extracting. — A writer in Central- 

 blatt says that frequent extracting excites to greater diligence 

 in storing. Perhaps this statement should have its place in 

 connection with the Mclntyre-Canadian-Bee-Journal-Ameri- 

 can-Bee-Keeper controversy. 



Yellow-Box Honey from Australia has been sampled by 

 the Southland Queen, which says, "We consider It Al, and 

 good enough for the king's table." Australians feel aggrieved 

 that Londoners will not admit that it is good enough for the 

 queen's table, nor indeed for any table. 



Do Bees Creep into the Cells in Winter?— Dzierzon 

 says they do. Rauschenfels, supported by Lehzen, the able 

 editor of Centralblatt, says his bees remain In the spaces be- 

 tween the combs, constantly exchanging places, and when a 

 bee is found in a cell, except as it goes there for food or be- 

 cause disturbed, such bee is dead, stone-dead. 



Getting Unfinisht Sections Cleaned. — Chalon Fowls 

 gives his method in Gleanings. At the time of taking ofl 

 supers a bee-escape is left on a colony short of stores. When 

 ready to have unfinisht sections cleaned up, the escape is 

 taken out of the board, and the hole plugged up with a block 

 having a small hole In it. Then supers of sections to be 

 cleaned are piled on, and the bees do the rest. 



Finding Queens is uphill business for beginners. For 

 their encouragement, the Southland Queen tells of an Inex- 

 perienced hand, oue of three who lookt through 16S colonies, 

 and he didn't find a queen. " At times we would point to the 

 queen and the man could not see her. At one time we had 

 him touch the queen with his pencil before he coiild see her, 

 and this, too, after he had been shown nearly a hundred 

 queens." 



Separators in Shipping-Cases — Mention is made in 

 Gleanings of the use of separators or pieces of thin veneer be- 

 tween the rows of sections in shipping-cases. A number of 

 the York Staters use thin veneering stuff, and E. Kretchmer 

 advocates separators, in the Canadian Bee Journal, so that if 

 a section of honey falls down it will not break down its neigh- 

 bor. Something of the kind is said to be a necessity with no- 

 bee-way sections, in which the comb comes almost flush with 

 the outer edge of the section. 



Bees in Winter. — W. Albrecht, in Centralblatt, compares 

 the winter rest of the bees to that of the badger, which does 

 not remain entirely motionless throughout the winter, but 

 turns over in its sleep from lime to time. So in severe cold 

 the cluster of bees is constantly changing, the outer bees 

 working toward the center to get warm ; 5U^ Fahrenheit is 

 the minimum temperature for the outer bees. If, through 



lack of food or through disease, the temperature sinks below 

 this point, then death ensues through freezing, gradually ex- 

 tending to the center. The greater the cold the more fuel 

 must be used to keep up the heat, that is, the more must be 

 eaten, in order to keep up the temperature of the periphery 

 to 50 '. So It may happen that in the midst of the severest 

 winter brood may be reaied, requiring a temperature of from 

 86Jto95 5. 



Prevention of Virgin Swarms. — In Hanover, Germany, 

 it is a common thing for a prime swarm to send out a swarm 

 Itself in about four weeks. To prevent this, and the conse- 

 quent reduction of surplus resulting from it, the bee-keeper 

 has prepared In advance a number of nuclei with a young 

 queen and a handful of bees each, and these nuclei swap hives 

 with the prime swarms. That is, all the bees are brusht out 

 of each hive, and the nucleus receives the full combs and 

 brood in return tor its meagerly supplied hive. 



Dry Lumber for Hives.— M. A. Gill says that for very 

 dry climates such as Colorado, lumber should be kiln-dried to 

 the " last extremity " before being used for hives. He had a 

 lot of supers with a 5/16 space over the sections, but the 

 shrinkage of the lumber in the supers reduced the space to 

 such an extent that when the cover was forcibly taken off a 

 considerable number of the sections were ruined by being 

 pulled apart. The bees had glued them fast to the cover. Dry 

 lumber and exact spaces are two things that can hardly be 

 separated.— Gleanings. 



Hanover Bee-Keepers. — Uerr Lehzen, editor of Central- 

 blatt, gives an interesting account of the bee-keepers in the 

 province of Hanover, Germany. They form a sort of guild 

 by themselves. To become an Imker (bee-keeper) a young 

 m'an serves an apprenticeship of two years to a professional, 

 that is, to one who has himself past through an apprentice- 

 ship, and he is then ready to secure a position with a farmer 

 to take care of his bees. The Imker neither reads bee-jour- 

 nals nor writes for them, but he has his trade well learned, is 

 keen, alert, and a successful practitioner. His rule is : Keep 

 only strong colonies, for few but strong colonies bring greater 

 results than many weak colonies. 



A Worker-Bee's Temperature. — The Germans are noted 

 for painstaking research, and some of them have been trying 

 to find out what is the temperature of a worker-bee. One 

 man masht a clump of bees and then applied the thermometer. 

 Dzierzon, in an address at the Wiesbaden convention, declared 

 that it was a fruitless task to try to determine thetempera- 

 ture of a worker, as it has no temperature whatever. A col- 

 ony or cluster has a temperature, but not a separate bee. The 

 bee takes the temperature of the surrounding atmosphere, 

 and on flying away from its companions must hasten back if 

 the thermometer be not above 45^ or 50^. It must at least 

 be admitted that a separate bee has little ability to keep a 

 temperature higher than the surrounding atmosphere. 



A Portable House-Apiary.— Editor Root describes a 

 house-apiary of Miles Morton, of New York, that is put to- 

 gether in sections, each section adding to the length of the 

 building, the sections formed of panels that can be taken 

 apart and the whole moved at any time from one location to 

 another. A peculiarity of the building— entirely independent 

 of its portable character— is the way in which the walls are 

 built. The upper part of the building is wider than the lower. 

 The lower part rises perpendicularly to the proper height for 

 the second tier of hives, then a jog in the wall allows the 

 hives to rest fairly balanced on the siding. This answers a 

 double purpose— the hives have a strong support, and the 

 lower hives are in the right place to stand on while working 

 at the upper. 



Late-Reared Queens. —Mr. Doolittle says in Gleanings 

 that in his experience half the unfertilized queens he winters 

 over never lav at all. This agrees withoneof the propositions 

 laid down by'Dzierzon about -tO years ago, that i/ an unfer- 

 tilized queen laid she could produce only drones. But Doolit- 

 tle considers an unfertilized queen, whether barren or a drone- 

 layer, of some value in a strong colony through the winter- 

 that is, the colony is better off with such a queen than with 

 none at all, for the bees will remain more quiet and winter 

 better if they have something they recognize as a queen. 

 Then the colony can bo saved by introdncing a queen from 

 the South in the spring. It would, however, be better to get 

 this queen from the South In the preceding fall, then she 

 would commence laying in February or March, making the 

 colony stronger for the harvest. 



