October, 1907. 



Amc^rican ^e Journal 



«!iaei:- 



'Beedoiiv_>' ^ 



'Boiled T)owivy^ 



J 



Empty Comb, Not Empty Space, Pre- 

 vents Swarming. 



Listen to what that veteran bee-keep- 

 er, Moses Quinby, wrote : A large 

 amount of room filled with empty comb 

 will entirely prevent swarming; and 

 years of experience and experimenting 

 iias proven tlmt Mr. Quinby was right. 

 Let me illustrate this thing for you a 

 little further: Let a strong colony oc- 

 cupy a dry-goods box, the same being 

 4 feet square on the inside, they hav- 

 ing a space of only about 2,000 cubic 

 inches occupied with comb, and that 

 colony will swarm, notwithstanding all 

 the room there is in the box. But if the 

 whole box is filled with comb, no swarm 

 will issue under the conditions described. 

 — G. M. Doolittle, in Gleanings in Bee 

 Culture. 



Breeding for Non-Swarming. 



At the convention of Victorian apiar- 

 ists, the prevailing opinion seemed to be 

 that much could be done by proper se- 

 lection toward breeding out the swarm- 

 ing impulse. W. Garrett was reported 

 as having a colony that had not swarmed 

 for 2 years, and by breeding from that 

 colony he reduced swarming to 5 per- 

 cent. H. L. Jones said that 20 years 

 ago he was frantic through chasing 

 swarms, and has no trouble now, 

 through rearing his queens under a 

 non-swarming influence. Mr. Bolton 

 said that by rearing queens out of the 

 swarming season he had almost reached 

 a non-swarming strain. — Australasian 

 Bee-Keeper. 



Hutchinson and Late Extracting. 



Editor Hutchinson has become an ad- 

 vocate of leaving extracting-combs on 

 the hive till the close of the season, and 

 is quite enthusiastic over it. He says. 

 "It is then perfectly ripened and all 

 sealed over, and has a body and flavor 

 I never dreamed until I put this method 

 into practise." 



As to having the hon-ey warm enough 

 to work well, he says: 



"Honey warmed up artificially to as 

 high a degree as it will bear without 

 softening the combs too much, can be 

 extracted quicker and cleaner than 

 honey as it usually comes from the 

 bees." 



He thus gives particulars as to heat- 

 ing, in the Bee-Keeper's-Review. 



"Last year I heated up the honey by 

 means of a coal-stove; this year we are 

 using a Perfection kerosene-oil heater; 

 and it is perfection. It is the first oil- 

 burning stove I ever saw that would 

 not smoke. It has a cylindrical wick, 

 and just above the wick is a round plate 

 of iron called the 'flame spreader,' and 

 the wick is turned up until it strikes this 

 'spreader,' when it can go no higher, 



and it won't smoke and can't be made 

 to do so. One end of the honey-house, 

 or cellar, is partitioned off, making an 

 'oven,' as we call it, large enough to 

 hold so or 60 supers. We fill this up at 

 night, light the stove just before we go 

 to bed, and turn the wick part way up, 

 so that the temperature at the top of 

 the room will stand at about 100 de- 

 grees. In tlie morning we re-fill the 

 stove, turn it on full blast, and go to 

 extracting, taking the first supers from 

 the top of the rooin. As some of the 

 piles are lowered, more supers are taken 

 from other piles and added to these, 

 thus bringing more honey up into the 

 heated 'zone.' As fast as there is va- 

 cant room, more supers are brought in, 

 and sort of a routine is followed where- 

 by one always has hot honey to work; 

 and more a-heating. It uncaps so eas- 

 ily, extracts so easily, and strains so 

 easily." 



Several Queens in One Hive With- 

 out Excluder. 



First, prepare a small box, about five 

 or six inches square, by boring a one- 

 half-inch hole in one end. This you 

 will for the present close, then remove 

 a part of its two sides and cover with 

 wire cloth so as to ventilate it well. This 

 we call our introducing-box. Take this 

 box and a common queen-cage to the 

 colony to which you wish to introduce 

 your choice queen, or several of them, 

 in fact ; remove its combs and put its 

 queen, without any bees, into the queen- 

 cage you have. While doing this shake 

 about a pint of bees of the colony into 

 the introducing-box. Close it and take 

 all their combs from the colony. These 

 can be placed on top of almost any hive 

 until next day. The hives now made 

 broodless, fill about half full of combs 

 containing some honey biit no brood. 

 Leave the colony alone until about sun- 

 down, after which it will show distress 

 over the loss of its queen and brood. 

 Now take the box of bees to the honey- 

 house, and at the same time the queen, 

 but don't set them near each other. 

 The bees in the little box will soon 

 miss their queen and have lots of trou- 

 ble. 



After they have been confined about 

 five hours prepare some warm thin 

 honey, placing it in a dish so that, by 

 laying the box on one side, the bees 

 can easily reach the honey through the 

 wire cloth, but can not daub themselves 

 with it. Leave them this way until you 

 are sure that every bee in the box is as 

 full of honey as it can be, then give 

 them a little shake and remove the 

 cover from the hole in the end of the 

 box (remember it is about five hours 

 since they were confined in the box), 

 and let run in any number of queens 

 you wish, including their own mother. 



Now return them to their dish of honey 

 so they can help themselves to all they 

 can cat until about sundown; then take 

 this introducing-box with its bees and 

 queens to the hive from which you took 

 the bees and their queen in the morn- 

 ing; set them to one side and feed the 

 colony all you can induce it to eat. Re- 

 move some of its combs and pour in 

 some of the honey you have been feed- 

 ing to the bees in the box. Shake some 

 of this honey out of its combs on these 

 bees, so every one will soon be full. 

 Now remove the cover of the introduc- 

 ing-box and set the box in the hive 

 alongside the combs. Close up the top 

 of the hive, and in the morning all the 

 bees and queens will be clustered on the 

 combs, and some of the queens will have 

 commenced to lay. You can now give 

 them the brood you took away from 

 them the day before, or let them fill 

 their combs with eggs, which five queens 

 will do in three or four days. '1 hat is 

 all there is of it. 



You now have the colony all togethei 

 with their brood and their mother- 

 queen, and as many other queens as you 

 care to have in one colony. There has 

 not been a queen balled or injured in 

 any way.— E. W. Alexander, in Glean- 

 ings in Bee Culture. 



Root Routs Robber-Bees. 



It is not to the credit of a bee-keeper 

 that he allows conditions that induce 

 robbing; but sometimes a case will hap- 

 pen even with the most experienced, and 

 when bees have a good start at robbing 

 it is not the easiest thing to stop them. 

 Editor Root has a plan that would seem 

 to fit the most desperate case. He says, 

 in Gleanings in Bee Culture : 



"Very lately we have found a remedy 

 that does away with the whole trouble, 

 and that, too, within a very few hours. 

 This consists simply of the use of a 

 robber-trap. This is nothing more noi 

 less than an ordinary hive having a 

 contracted entrance and a bee-escape on 

 the inside, so placed that bees can pass 

 in readily but not out. A wire-cloth 

 cone, or, perhaps, better, a regular Por- 

 ter should be used. 



"We will assume that a bad case of 

 robbing has suddenly developed in which 

 the colony or nucleus is nearly over- 

 powered if not entirely so. If the at- 

 tack is confined to the one colony, the 

 problem is much simpler. In that case 

 we remove the attacked hive imme- 

 diately, and put it down cellar with the 

 windows all darkened but one, so that 

 the bees that do not belong in the hive 

 can escape and go back. On the stand 

 of the hive of the colony removed we 

 put the hive with the bee-escape on the 

 inside of the entrance, or what we will 

 call our trap, when, presto ! all the rob- 

 bers will rush into this hive and be im- 

 prisoned. It is only a matter of an hour 

 or so before they are all caught ; and 

 what was once a perfect uproar in the 

 yard will now be as quiet as though 

 nothing had eved happened. When this 

 condition prevails, or toward nightfall, 

 the attacked colony that was put in the 

 cellar is put back on its own stand, but 

 with its entrance contracted down to a 

 space so that only one bee can pass at 

 a time. A frame of young bees is 

 shaken into the hive, and nearly all the 



