308 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



September 



in a strong stock for longer than 

 usual, were noticed to be feeble or 

 dead. 



Then the experiment was tried of 

 mixing the food for the cages with 

 pollen, fresh honey and powdered su- 

 gar, making the food moister than 

 usual. Queens on such food did 

 nicely, even though long confined. 



Will some queen breeders please 

 observe and report facts as they find 

 them, and perhaps some of our ex- 

 periment stations can make special 

 studies of the subject. 



Bear in mind the foregoing refers 

 to food in nursery cages, not to mail- 

 ing cages. 



without one. I am a farmer and have 

 been keeping bees for the last five 

 years. My limit is 20 colonies, for I 

 find that a few taken good care of 

 pay well, and that is about all I have 

 time to care for properly. 



JACKSON DAVIS. 

 Kentucky. 



QUEEN CAUGHT LAYING IN 

 QUEEN CELL 



All during early summer I made in- 

 crease. I took three frames of 

 emerging brood and one of honey and 

 placed all with adhering bees with 

 about two pounds of bees additional 

 on a new stand, giving a ripe queen 

 cell. A few days later I tallied for 

 the hatched virgin, and in another 

 couple of days for the laying queen. 



Weather conditions were good and 

 a heavy flow on, and my operations 

 were a great success. I made over 

 100 of these new colonies. 



One day recently, in looking for a 

 laying queen, I found a queen cell 

 instead, with an egg in it. I was 

 puzzled. The queen was there and 

 seemed to be laying satisfactorily. 

 The cell I destroyed. 



When I looked two days later the 

 bees had rebuilt it, and while I held 

 the comb the queen arrived at the 

 cell, poked her abdomen into it sev- 

 eral times, with her hind legs out- 

 side the cell. Each time she would 

 turn around and look down into the 

 cell, and once she dropped three eggs 

 on the outside of the cell. I replaced 

 the comb and shall observe closely 

 what comes of it. 



Evidently the bees were supersed- 

 ing the young queen. It seemed a 

 little unusual to me to have a young 

 queen laying in a queen cell to rear a 

 queen to supersede her. Something 

 I had never read of nor heard of. 

 JESS DALTON, 

 Bordelonville, La. 



SETTLING SWARMS 



I notice in Dr. Miller's answers the 

 question and answer on settling a 

 swarm flying in the air. I have set- 

 tled several stray swarms flying over 

 by following them to a plowed field 

 and throwing dirt into them. 



This season one of my own swarms 

 pulled out and left before I could fin- 

 ish the job. I followed them a short 

 distance to a freshly plowed corn 

 field and settled them in short order 

 with the dirt treatment. 



The queen in the above swarm was 

 a virgin trying to make away with a 

 first swarm, and these same bees 

 swarmed twice, in 30 minutes or less, 

 about a week before, each time re- 

 turning to the hive, as the old queen 

 would not accompany them. 



I would advise the wearing of a bee 

 veil, if one is handy, to any one try- 

 ing to stop a swarm by this method, 

 as I have never failed to get stung 



DEATH FROM STING 



There was a sad accident here 

 about 10 days ago. A neighbor's lit- 

 tle girl, at play, being barefooted, 

 stepped on a bee, or was stung on 

 the sole of her foot (by a honeybee 

 or a hornet, hard to tell). She was 

 taken with spasms. The doctor was 

 called. He could do nothing. The 

 girl died within an hour. The doctor 

 said he never heard of such a case 

 before. I am in my 87th year, writing 

 without glasses. 



M. S. SNOW, Puyallup, Wash. 



HONEY ADVERTISING 



By H. W. Hailey 



The truth of the statement, "There 

 is no royal road to success," has never 

 been questioned, yet D. M. Story, who 

 lives in the fertile Fountain Valley of 

 El Paso County, Colorado, has found 

 that a simple sign on his house by the 

 side of the road has given him a good 

 start on that royal pathway. 



This sign, "Eat Honey and Keep 

 Well," was the medium of advertising 

 which sold for this beekeeper 25,000 

 pounds of honey last year and devel- 

 oped for him a mail order business 

 that takes his honey to a score or 

 more Eastern States. Mr. Story lives 

 on the Colorado North and South 

 Highway between Pueblo and Colo- 

 rado Springs, a road that is traveled 

 each year bj' thousands of auto tour- 

 ists from many States, as well as 

 hundreds of Coloradoans. Some of 

 these people took their honey with 

 them, while others left mail orders 

 for late fall and winter shipments. 



Daniel M. Story was born on a farm 

 near Marion, Mich, thirty odd years 

 ago, and it was there, as a boy on his 

 father's farm that he learned to care 



D. M. Story, 3ucc<:»iul Colorado beekeeper. 



for bees. There were several hives 

 out in the old orchard, and the rob- 

 bing of these each fall was to Daniel 

 little short of a miracle. He loved to 

 vk'atch the bees work, and embraced 

 every opportunity to learn something 

 of their life and habits. As he grew 

 to young manhood he continued to 

 study bees, partly because he liked 

 honey and partly because there was a 

 good market for its sale in Detroit 

 and other nearby cities. Then came 

 a siege with pneumonia and lung 

 trouble, and the doctor advised his re- 

 moval to Colorado, and here begins 

 the story of his success as a honey 

 producer and salesman. 



It was seven years ago that he 

 came to Colorado, bringing with him 

 several colonies of bees. A homestead 

 claim was staked in the mountain 

 foothills, but he soon saw that if his 

 bees were to produce honey in pay- 

 ing quantities they must be closer to 

 the large fields .of blossoms, for the 

 flowers around his sand hills home 

 were few and far between. A small 

 place in the Fountain Valley, a sec- 

 tion where there are hundreds of 

 acres of alfalfa under irrigation, was 

 rented. His colonies prospered and 

 increased until today he has 180 of 

 them located at three different 

 points five miles apart, and from 

 these points they cover the valley for 

 a distance of twenty miles. 



The homestead was proved up, the 

 rented place purchased, a good house 

 built, but most important of all his 

 health was fully restored. "How did 

 I get the idea of putting out the 

 sign? Well, it was this way:" said 

 Mr. Story. "You see the flowers 

 have to have their pollen carried 

 from one bloom to another in order 

 to fertilize their seed, so they adver- 

 tise to the bees that they have honey 

 to give away in return for this ser- 

 vice of scattering the pollen. Their 

 fragrance is the advertising medium 

 and the honey is the commodity with 

 which they pay for the service. For 

 many years all my honey was sold to 

 the wholesalers, but I found that the 

 margin of profit over the cost of pro- 

 duction was not so large as it should 

 be, so I began to think. If the flowers 

 had so successfully found a way to 

 dispose of their pollen, there must 

 be some way in which I could attract 

 buyers, and that sign on the front of 

 my house is the result. You can judge 

 the success of it for yourself, for I 

 sold last year the 11,000 pounds of 

 honey that my bees produced, and 

 purchased 14,000 pounds from other 

 beekeepers in order to supply the de- 

 mands of tuy customers, in all more 

 than twice as much honey as I ever 

 sold in one year before." 



Mr. Story finds the production and 

 sale of honey not only a lucrative, 

 but an intensely interesting, occupa- 

 tion. "I thought I knew a lot about 

 bees when I came here, but I found 

 that I still have much to learn. 

 Keeping bees here is much different 

 than in the Eastern States. Here we 

 have a very short season of real 

 honey making. The few fruit trees 

 that blossom in May and June give 

 the bees their first activity of the 

 season, but we do not take honey 



