416 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



June 1. 



at the same time few swarms with a maximum 

 of honey and new wax, a large horizontal hive 

 is necessary, containing at the same time enough 

 combs for the laying of the queen that she may 

 not be hindered, enough combs to store all the 

 honey harvested and enough empty frames to 

 permit the young bees to construct new combs 

 at the time of their own preference for such 

 work. Of course, these conclusions may be all 

 right for extracted honey, but how about comb 

 honey '? 



His plan of having the new combs built is in 

 his large hive of twenty frames, the brood-nest 

 being at one end. then empty combs, then 

 combs of honey alternating with the empty 

 frames or frames of foundation. 



TWO QUEENS TO ONE COLONY. 



An esteemed correspondent across the water 

 asks my opinion as to the new method of man- 

 agement inaugurated by Mr. West in England. 

 It certainly looks as though it might be success- 

 ful. Yet so many times I have settled upon 

 some new plan, fe'eling sure that it must work, 

 and have been sadly disappointed to find that, 

 when turned over to the tender mercies of the 

 bees, the plan worked just the wrong way. I 

 am getting to be a good deal of a skeptic. The 

 fact that it has worked well in the hands of one 

 man, or for one year, or In one place, is not 

 conclusive proof that it will always work 

 everywhere. It is, however, well worth a trial, 

 and "I have no doubt it will be thoroughly 

 tried this season, at least in Great Britain. 



The plan, in brief, is, to have a perforated 

 division-board in the center of a hive, the per- 

 forations being queen-excluding, a queen in each 

 half of the hive, and a queen -excluder placed 

 over the brood-chamber and under the supers. 

 Thus the workers are allowed to commingle 

 freely, while each queen is kept on her own 

 side of the house. It is a generally accepted 

 theory, and I believe it is a fact, that strong 

 colonies are the ones that yield the most profit. 

 Indeed, the great effort of every bee-keeper is to 

 get his colonies strong by the time the princi- 

 pal harvest begins. With two queens in a hive 

 it is possible to have a larger force than with 

 one. I have little fear that either queen will 

 be killed. And yet my attempts to throw a 

 double force of workers into one set of supers 

 has not been crowned with the success that I 

 felt sure it deserved. One year I had a number of 

 colonies placed in pairs, practically two hives 

 on one stand. When the harvest began, I shook 

 nearlv all the bees of one hive into the other, 

 leaving the latter alone on the stand. I could 

 not make out that I got any thing more from 

 this united colony than I got from other single 

 colonies of the same strength as each of this 

 pair was. I don't know why. It certainly 

 seems they ought to have done better. Possi- 

 bly another trial would result differently. So I 

 don't feel very sanguine as to Mr. West's plan. 

 One objection to it is. that the chances for 

 swarming are increased. Trial alone will de- 

 cide as to the merits of the system. 

 Marengo, 111., May 5. C. C. Mn,i.ER. 



[We believe it is a fact, doctor, that can not 

 be disputed, at least if we can rely upon the re- 

 ports of large and extensive bee-keepers, that 

 more extracted than comb honey can be pro- 

 duced. C. A. Hatch brought this point out 

 quite plainly on page 229, April 1, and the same, 

 we notice, was copied recently in the British 

 Bee Journal, with the indorsement of the ed- 

 itors in a footnote. Well, then, your question, 

 "If building comb has some effect upon the 

 bees to make them harvest more, how does it 

 come that a greater yield of comb than ex- 

 tracted can be obtained? " it seems to us would 



be a poser for M. de Layens. Possibly he made 

 some mistake. We should like to see Layens' 

 experiment tried by different bee-keepers in 

 this country, particularly by John H. Larrabee, 

 of the Michigan Apiculiural Experiment Sta- 

 tion at Lansing. We hope he will undertake it 

 this summer and give us the results of the same 

 in due season.] 



BEE-KEEPING AFTER THE OLD FASHION IN 

 NORTH GERMANY, 



THE EDITOR OF THE " ILLUSTRIEETE BIENEN- 

 ZEITUNG " RELATES IN AN INTERESTING 

 MANNER HOW BEE-KEEPING IS CARRIED 

 ON WITHOUT MOVABLE FRAMES; HOW 

 HIVES ARE QUEENED AND UN- 

 QUEENED, ETC. 



It may interest many of the readers of Glean- 

 ings to know how the bee-keepers of North 

 Germany, especially in the province of Hann- 

 over and the dukedom of Brunswick, manage 

 their bees in the dome-shaped hives I described 

 in my last article. The readers will be aston- 

 ished to know by what simple methods they 

 keep their bees in the most profitable way. 



Well, they do not know any thing about the 

 natural history, anatomy, and physiology of 

 bees, nor what is written about theory in bee- 

 books. All they know of bees and their man- 

 agement is the result of the experience of their 

 forefathers, handed down from century to cen- 

 tury. After they have selected their colonies 

 in the fall, and placed them in their house- 

 apiary, that has an open front side, they shelter 

 the entrances with little boards so that the sun- 

 beams and birds may not disturb the bees; but 

 this is done in such a way that the bees may go 

 out and in. During the winter the bee-keepers 

 do absolutely nothing with their bees till the 

 time of a cleansing flight at the end of February 

 or in the month of March. Then they are 

 anxious to know the exact condition of every 

 colony. This is accomplished by turning over 

 the hive and getting a glimpse between the 

 combs, finding how strong the colony is, etc. 

 After cleaning the bottom -lioard they prepare 

 their colonies for the first moving to another 

 place, because their bees in their home have 

 little or nothing to live upon till July. Here in 

 their home it would take 2}o barrels of honey — 

 that is to say, 700 pounds — for nO colonies, to get 

 as many swarms as they wish for. To save 

 this honey they move their stocks. Covering 

 the opening of each hive with a cloth that they 

 tack to the hive, they load the hives on their 

 wagons and move their bees 20 or more miles to 

 a region where they find good bee-pasture in 

 the spring. 



One who has .50 colonies will take with him 

 300 lbs. of honey and 100 empty straw hives on 

 a second wagon. In an orchard our bee-keeper 

 has hired a place for such a bee-house as he has 

 at home, and therein he places his colonies. 

 After this he goes home. In April and May, on 

 some fine days he visits his bees to look them 

 over with the utmost care for three or four 

 days. As he has mostly colonies with young 

 queens of the previous year, he has seldom to 

 unite queenless colonies with others. Weak 

 colonies, if he has such, he provides with bees 

 from his best colonies. This is accomplished in 

 the following manner: When the bees are fly- 

 ing best, he sets a weak colony in the place of 

 a stronger one, but never a very weak one in 

 place of a very strong one, because the queen of 

 the weaker one would be killed. 



Another way to build up a very weak colony 

 is this: Toward evening he puts a flat feeding- 

 trough, with honey, under a strong colony. As 



