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42dYEAR.- 



CHICAGO, ILL, APRIL 3, 1902, 



No, 14, 



^ Editorial 



A IjarKe Kdition of this niunbei' of the 

 American Bee Journal will be mailed, some 

 of the copies ffoiug to bee-keepers who are 

 not now subscricers. We trust, they will be 

 so well pleased with it that they will want it 

 regularly hereafter. Only .iil.Od will pay for 

 it for a whole year— 52 weeks — 52 copies 1 It 

 ought to be a good investment to any one 

 who wants to make anything out of his bees. 



The Chicago Convention Report is 



begun this week. While it has been some 

 time since the meeting was held, it will read 

 just as well as if it had been published sooner. 

 We preferred to give place to the proceedings 

 of all the other conventions first, and let our 

 own local meeting come last. It will be a 

 good report of a good convention, and will 

 probably run in installments every week for 

 two months or more. It was the best con- 

 vention ever held by the Chicago Bee-Keepers' 



Association. 



*■ 



An Attempt to Outlaw Sweet Clover, 



says Gleanings in Bee-Culture, has been made 

 in Ohio, and if Ohio bee-keepers are alive to 

 their interests they will at once write to their 

 Representatives and Senators urging the de- 

 feat of House Bill 59S, which classes sweet 

 clover among noxious weeds, and directs that 

 township trustees shall cut it down whenever 

 complaint is made. It is refreshing to know 

 that at the Ohio Agricultural Experiment 

 Station the Director is such a man as Prof. 

 Thorne. Here is a letter from him to A. I. 

 Root: 



.My Brid- Sir: — If you find any serious at- 

 tempt to have sweet clover declared a noxious 

 weed, please let me know. I should consider 

 such a declaration aijout as wise as one to call 

 red clover such a weed, and will fight it with 

 all my might. I was one of the first to call 

 attention to the peculiar habit of this plant 

 of growing on soils where no other plant will 

 thrive, a little article of mine on this point 

 having been published as far back as 18"", 

 and quoted throughout the range of the agri- 

 cultural press. Yours truly, 

 (Die. L.) Chas. E. Thokne, director. 



The Colorado Foul-Brood Plan of 



managing so as to kill it out and at the same 

 time get a crop of honey by shaking off nearly 

 all the bees upon frames filled with founda- 

 tion, was copied some time ago from the 

 Rocky Mountain Bee Journal. Editor Hutch- 

 inson says it is really the Heddon method of 

 transferring, and his advice that the work 



should not l)e prematurely undertaken deserves 

 strong emphasis. He says: 



I might say, in a few words, that the old 

 hi\c and its combs of hatching l)rood should 

 be managed alnuist exactly the same as would 

 the hive of a colony that had swarmed. In 

 short, tills method is nothing more or less 

 than forced swarming, and the work should 

 not be done until the colonies are nearly ready 

 to swarm — perhaps some of them /imr 

 swarmed. Toatlcmpt it too early, l)efore the 

 colonies are populous, the weather warm, 

 and plenty of honey in the fields, would be 

 disastrous. 



He further says that the plan is really 

 swarming, with the advantage that the 

 swarming is done when we want it rather 

 than when the bees want it, and quotes H. R. 

 Boardman — one of the most reliable practi- 

 tioners — as following the plan in his out- 

 apiaries to solve the swarming problem. " He 

 vi-sits his out-yards about once a week, and 

 every colony populous enough to swarm is 

 thus ' swarmed ' by the shaking-off process." 



With regard to disposal of the brood taken 

 away, enough bees are left to care for the 

 brood, which is put upon a new stand, and 

 Mr. Hutchinson suggests that after all brood 

 is sealed the queen-cells should be destroyed 

 and a cell of choice stock be given. 



Wax-Worms and Basswood. — It was 



given out in Gleanings in Bee-Culture that 

 basswood was the proper lumber for top-bars, 

 because wax-worms would not burrow in it 

 as they do in pine. Dr. Miller replied that 

 basswood would warp and twist too much to 

 be used in bee-hives, and later he says he has 

 found unmistakable proof that wax-worms 

 bore into basswood the same as into pine. 



Ventilation of Bee-Cellars is a topic 

 that is being ventilated in Gleanings in Bee- 

 Culture by T. F. Bingham and G. M. Doolittle. 

 The former advocates a ventilator 16 inches 

 square, while the latter seems to think little 

 or no ventilation is needed. " When doctors 

 disagree," etc. 



Bee-Keeping in the United States. 



— The Census Bureau, on March 21, issued a 

 complete report showing that for the country 

 as a whole, on June 1, 1900. there were 707,261 

 farms keeping bees, substantially one for 

 every eight farms. These farms reported 

 4,109,626 colonies, valued at ?10, 186,513, 

 averaging a little less than six colonies to 

 each farm reporting, says the Washington 

 Post. The twelfth census is the first to re- 

 port the number and value of bees, or the 

 number of farms reporting them. 



During the year 1S99, there were produced 

 61,106,160 pounds of honey and 1,765,315 

 pounds of wax, of an aggregate value for the 



honey and wax of ?i6,ti(»4,i)04, or ?9.42 for each 

 farm reporting the same. Of this value, X> 

 percent is from the North Central. 12 percent 

 from the North Atlantic, 15 percent from the 

 South Atlantic, 23 percent from the South 

 Central, 14 percent from the Western States, 

 and .1 percent from Hawaii. The products 

 of Hawaii were 06,870 pounds of honey and 

 1,720 pounds of wax. 



Of the States reporting honey, Texas re- 

 ports the largest quantity, 4,780,204 pounds. 

 California reports the second largest quan- 

 tity, 3,667,738 pounds, and New Vork the 

 third largest, .3,422,427. The counties show- 

 ing the heaviest production are Fresno, San 

 Diego, and Tulare, of California, and Tomp- 

 kins, Cayuga, and Seneca, of New York. 



We imagine that the reported pounds of 

 honey, and also of beeswax, are far below the 

 actual production. We think perhaps 700,000 

 farms where bees are kept must be somewhere 

 nearly correct. Perhaps by the time the next 

 census is taken more reliable apiarian statis- 

 tics can be had. 



The British Standard Frame is 14x- 



8}^ — not quite three-fourths the capacity of 

 the Langstroth~and the British Bee Journal 

 is emphatic in the opinion that an increase of 

 size would be a backward step. Ten frames 

 in a hive is considered about the right thing, 

 that being about the same as 7'i Langstroth 

 frames. There is, however, a controversy 

 starting in the British Bee Journal as to the 

 advisability of a change in frames. F. W. L. 

 Sladen says: 



When I was in America I was surprised to 

 see the great diversity of sizes of frames used, 

 and all were claimed by their advocates to be 

 better for their purpose than any others. 



Influence of Nurse-Bees. — F. B. Simp- 

 son — the man who is writing such an inter- 

 esting series of articles in the Bee-Keepers' 

 Review concerning the breeding of bees — 

 thinks there must have been ' some very care- 

 less reading on the part of the American Bee 

 Journal to allow it to say that Mr. Simpson 

 inclines to the view that a changing of nurse- 

 bees might produce a queen very different 

 from what she would have been had her own 

 sisters been the nurses. The carelessness, so 

 far as there was any, was not in reading but 

 in writing. It is true that Mr. Simpson in- 

 clines to that view, but he is far from being 

 strongly inclined, and it would have been 

 much better to have said that he inclines 

 very slightly to that view. So far from tak- 

 ing the ultra view that some have taken, he 

 expressed the belief that the influence of the 

 nurse-bees "is undoubtedly extremely slight 

 in comparison with the hereditary properties 



