m 



G^LlSAJ^lNGg ii^ BEE CULTURE. 



MAY 



the large oak-trees in front of his dwelling. This 

 tree is known to be over a hundred years old. I 

 learned that, several years ago, a swarm of bees as- 

 sembled in that tree as their new home, and they 

 have lived and worked there ever since. After 

 they had been there three years the colony became 

 very large and strong, and no attempt had ever 

 been made to rob them of their honey. At last Mr. 

 Mitchell came to the conclusion that the tree must 

 be full of honey, from seeing the large number of 

 hies and iiees around the root of the tree; so he 

 set to work to devise some means to get the honey 

 without cutting the tree down. After supplying all 

 the tests known to bee-men he satisfied himself 

 that the tree was full, and then decided to tap it. 

 So he got him a faucet and an auger, and bored a 

 hole in the tree near the root, and then screwed in 

 the faucet, and, to his surprise and great delight, a 

 solid stream of pure and elegant honey, as clear as 

 crystal, gushed forth, and the supply seemed to be 

 inexhaustible. It continued to pour out until he 

 had tilled six barrels, and he has drawn each year 

 since that time from three to four barrels of pure 

 strained honey from that old oak-tree, and up to this 

 there seems to be no signs of failure of the supply, 

 as the bees are still a very strong and healthy colony. 

 The same year that Mr. Mitchell tapped the old 

 oak-tree there was a new thick growth sprung up 

 around the old oak, of an unusual appearance, hav- 

 ing a smooth bark and thick waxy leaves. One day 

 he pulled off one of the leaves and put it in his 

 mouth, and found it to be very sweet; and upon 

 examining the place from which he had picked the 

 leaf he discovered that the plant was bleeding, or 

 emitting from the wound a clear thick-looking 

 juice, which, upon tasting and examination, proved 

 to be honey. He then commenced to nurse the 

 new volunteer growth with the tenderest care and 

 attention, looking after them daily; and as the 

 summer advanced, the plants continued to grow; 

 and in the fail he selected and transplanted 300 of 

 them in very rich soil, thirty feet apart, and they 

 grew very rapidly, making a beautiful display with 

 their straight smooth trunks and their thick and 

 glossy wax-like leaves, and the grove was seen and 

 admired by all for miles and miles around. Mr. 

 Mitchell's idea was that, as large money was made 

 from the sugar maple by boiling the juice, he ought 

 to make more from a tree that would run the pure 

 honey, and he was right. When the trees were 

 four years old, in the fall of the year they -were 

 large enough to insert faucets. So he had 300 fau- 

 cets made to order, and screwed them into the 

 young trees, and the following spring the result 

 was remarkable. Each tree yielded an average of 

 ten gallons of the richest golden honey; the follow- 

 ing year each tree yielded an average of twenty 

 gallons, and now the average is about a barrel to 

 each tree during the year, and the grove continues 

 to grow and tiourish, and shows no signs of failing 

 to supply a bountiful yield in the years to come. 

 The quality of the honey is so fine, and the flavor is 

 so delicate, that it always commands the highest 

 prices, and the demand is greater than the supply. 



A hollow tree might contain a barrel of 

 honey, iiiul there might be bees enough to 

 store" it for a year ; but the above story goes 

 on to say that the farmer named Mitchell 

 has .">00 rnore of the trees planted out, and 

 that, when the trees were four years old, 

 each young tree yielded golden honey. 

 Now, i am sure that the newspaper that 

 gives place to such a yarn does itself a dam- 

 age that it can not soon get over ; and every 

 paper, north and south, that copies it, es- 

 pecially under the guise of a truthful state- 

 ment, also damages its standing among sen- 

 sible people. It looks now as if almost 

 every paper in the land were going to copy 

 it ; and so far, I have not seen a single pro- 

 test from any editor. Dear friends of the 

 press, is there not ignorance and supersti- 

 tion enough in the land, without having our 

 papers and joiu-nals go into the business ? 

 The press sliould be our edticators ; and 

 their special ofhce and Held is to put down 

 fraud and humbug. Some of you may say, 

 that if any man, woman, or child believes 



such foolish stories it is their own fault. 

 Not so. It is our business to guide the 

 young and the illiterate ; to sift truth from 

 falsehood. If you want to print any such sto- 

 ries for the fun of it, add a postscript or short 

 editorial that will effectually prevent any 

 Credulous person from accepting the whole 

 thing as truth. Remember the " comb hon- 

 ey "and "artificial eggs" stories. Thou- 

 sands of good people gravely declared that 

 eggs were manufactured so skillfully that 

 none but experts could tell the genuine 

 from the bogus. The reporter probably did 

 visit a bee-man, aiid very likely this bee- 

 man was unable to supply the demand for 

 his honey. lie may also have had a bee- 

 tree on his premises, and perhaps he may 

 have had a maple-sugar grove— that is, it 

 they make maple sugar in the South. The 

 reporter, seeing the maple sap drip from the 

 wooden sap-spiles into wooden l)uckets, got 

 things mixed. Perhaps if the State of 

 Georgia had managed to shut up all the sa- 

 loons, this reporter might not have got ma- 

 ple sap and golden honey so confused in his 

 imagination. The Saturday Telegram, of 

 Albany, N. Y., says the reporter "took his 

 wife along. It is a pity she was not still 

 with him when he wrote up the story about 

 that visit. 



THE FOOD OF LARVAL BEES. 



THE I.OWER HEAD GT^ANDS. 



Continued from last issue. 



foIHE ducts from the lower head glands open 

 ^ into the lower part of the mouth, between 

 i the muscles of the mouth. If the bee chews, 

 this secretion must surely empty and be 

 mixed with the chewed material. This, 

 then, is mixed with the pollen. This is certainly 

 true; for the pollen in the honey-stomach shows 

 some of its caps opened or elevated; and as no 

 gastric juice is secreted in the honey-stomach, 

 tills partial digestion is accomplished by the saliva, 

 and presuiiiubly t hat from the lower head glands. 

 Further, this saliva is used in kneading the wax by 

 the jaws. F. Huber (New ()lise)vati(ms) says that 

 the fresh wax scales and the chewed wav are chem- 

 ically different; and Euleumayer and Von Planta 

 found in the wa.x scales 0.5977% nitrogen, while in 

 the chewed wax there was 0.95;t . This must be due 

 to this saliva. So we see that these glands secrete 

 true saliva, and so can not be organs to secrete bee- 

 food. 



(I replied to the last argument in last issue. The 

 above positions are well taken. Is it not quite like- 

 ly that these glands serve merely to mix with and 

 partially digest the pollen, and that Wolff's glands 

 at the base of the mandibles are the glands that 

 moisten the wax'/) 



The large size of these glands is no argument 

 favorable to the gland theory, if we take into con- 

 sideration that the saliva is veiy important in di- 

 gestion, and in part takes the place of the gastric 

 ferment of higher animals. Surely a large quantity 

 of saliva is added to the pollen food of bees, and so 

 this saliva is indirectly a part of the chyle and larval 

 food. 



(This is surely a powerful argument. We secrete 

 saliva almost entirely to moisten our food, and the 

 daily quantity is estimated at three pints. If this 



