1884 



GLEANINGS IN EEE CULTURE- 



631 



bees, and I used to help do every thiug with them, 

 and I'll fix your bees so they will make ever so much 

 honey, if you'll let me.' 



" ' Why, of course you may,' said I ; ' you may do 

 any thing- you please with them. They have never 

 been of any use to us. They swarm out every sum- 

 mer, and we hive them, and they sting us to pay for 

 it, and that is all the pay we ever get. They don't 

 make honey enough to keep themselves, and some 

 of them die every winter.' 



"And that child took those bees— there were six- 

 live colonies and four dead ones— and she lifted the 

 mortgage with them— lifted it right otf our backs, as 

 it were, and let us stand free once more. That night 

 she talked with Jordon about it. He was skeptical 

 at first, for he did not believe that she could do any 

 thing with them; but, after she had told him all 

 about Pearson's bees, and the tons of honey that 

 they sold, he consented, and said she might try it, 

 and that he would get the lumber and things she 

 wanted. You see, Ruth was an 'amateur' cai-pen- 

 ter; that was what she called herself when any one 

 said any thing about her carpenter work. We had 

 a chest of tools that belonged to brother Charles, 

 and Kuth's father was a carpenter, and had let her 

 make little things, and she loved to work in wood. 



" The next morning Jordon went to Ashland to 

 mill, and Ruth went with him, and she went to all 

 the stores, and picked out the kind of boxes that 

 she wanted, and Jordon paid for them. Then he 

 drove to a lumber-yard and bought two wide boards 

 for covers, and Ruth sent to a bee-furnishing house 

 for frames to hang in them. And before the frames 

 came, she had made those twelve boxes into 'patent' 

 hives, and she took the empty comb from the hives 

 where the bees had died (they were hollow logs saw- 

 ed off, with boards nailed on one end), and fastened 

 it in the new frames with pieces of tin cut from old 

 fruit-cans. She used only the worker-comb; she 

 said bees had too much drone-comb any way, if they 

 built the combs themselves. Before Ruth came, we 

 always had exciting times when the bees swarmed. 

 We rang the dinner-bell, and beat the bottoms out 

 of tin pans, and threw water among them, and took 

 out the looking-glass, and often Jordon would fire 

 off the gun before they would begin to settle; and 

 we'd hurry and scurry, here and yonder, to get 

 them down and into the hives. But, Ruth changed 

 all that. When the first swarm began to come out, 

 she went and stood close to the hive; and when the 

 queen came out she caught her and brought her in- 

 to the house in her hand; she clipped one wing 

 with Polly's new scissors, and put her under a tum- 

 bler.on a plate. Then she placed the new hive di- 

 rectly in front of the old one, which she had cover- 

 ed with my old black shawl, and she sat in the shade 

 of the maple-trees, and waited for the bees to come 

 back. 



" I felt dreadfully nervous to see that large clus- 

 ter of bees hanging there. They were high up on 

 the May cherry-tree, and nobody doing any thing. 

 But presently they began to come back, and you 

 should have seen them piling and tumbling over 

 each other in their haste to get into the hive. They 

 acted just as if they were ashamed of going out at 

 all, and wanted to hurry in before any one saw 

 them. Ruth put the queen down on the bottom- 

 board, and let her lun in with the rest. Ruth and 

 Polly carried the new swarm, and set it on four 

 bricks, on the north side of the white lilac ; for Ruth 

 said the bees needed a little shade in hot weather. 



And sometimes when the bees did not cluster as 

 soon as I thought they ought to, I would get excited, 

 and ask Ruth if I hadn't better beat something, but 

 she said there was no need of it. She made drone- 

 guards of an old zinc that we had thrown away. 

 She cut it in strips, and punched them full of holes 

 just large enough for the worker-bees to go through. 

 These she fastened at the entrance of each hive. 

 She left them up until the middle of the day, when 

 the drones go out to play, and then she shut them 

 down, and there would be handfuls of them chilled 

 to death under the hives every morning. 



" She said the best thing about comb foundation 

 was, that it enabled us to control the production of 

 drones, and that a few inches of drone-comb was 

 enough for any hive. Oh you ought to hear Ruth 

 talk about bees! She had the contents of the 

 bee journals at her tongue's end, and she would 

 quote Virgil and Quinby and Langstroth to prove 

 any thing that she wanted to prove, and in a week 

 or two after they swarmed she put on honey-boxes; 

 and almost before we knew it, they were filled with 

 the nicest white-clover honey, and she took them off 

 and put on more, and we soon had the top of the 

 safe piled full of honey clear to the ceiling; and 

 whenever Jordon went to town he took a box along, 

 and traded it for sugar and things, and we were a 

 very sweet family indeed. 



"We made *45.62'/2 from the bees that year, be- 

 sides eating all the honey we wanted, and giving 

 away some, and we had two full boxes to last us till 

 honey came again. We had ten colonies of bees in 

 good condition; and all that long hot summer, when 

 Ruth was so busy with the bees and other woi-k, she 

 never neglected her lessons. Sometimes she stud- 

 ied only half an hour at noon when Jordon was in 

 the house to help her, and sometimes an hour at 

 night after the day's work was done. She would 

 read every thing she could find. The next winter 

 she went to school to Jordon. He taught our school, 

 and she had only a mile to go, and she never missed 

 a day. The next spring she sent for hives in the 

 flat. They cost seventy cents each, and she nailed 

 them together herself. She had a guage to hold 

 them straight, and a picture of the hive to look at. 

 She painted them red, white, and blue, and she 

 named our apiary 'The Union,' and the hives were 

 our colors, she said. Then she sent for a cold-blast 

 smoker, that didn't singe the bees' wings a mite, 

 and we all wore bee-hats made of wire screen; but 

 we worked with bare hands, and with our sleeves 

 rolled up; and when the bees stung us we did not 

 mind it much. 



"One day the Rev. Mr. Carr, our new preacher, 

 was taking supper with us, and the talk ran on bees; 

 and Ruth said, 'Do you know that, after the bees 

 have stung you about two hundred times you get so 

 full of the poison that you don't feel it at all? ' 



"'I believe j'oul'said the reverend gentleman. 

 ' If two hundred bees should sting me, I'm quite sure 

 I should never feel anythinu again,' and he laughed 

 heartily. 



"That year we raised queens to sell. First, Ruth 

 sent for Italian and Holy-Land queens; and so fast 

 as they came she killed our common queens, and 

 introduced the pure ones. Then she advertised in 

 the bee journals that she would sell ' dollar queens.' 



" We sold over a hundred queens and three colo- 

 nies of bees and some honey. That was not a good 

 honey year. We sent the queens in funny little 

 boxes called queen-cages, made of wood and tin, 



