• DELVOTELD' 



•AND Honey , 



•AND HOME.- "?< 

 •INTERESTS 



-1 $i°°perMar ^@"^EblNA•0H10• 



Vol. XXV. 



JULY 15, 1897. 



No. 14 



Please, Messrs. A. I. Root Co., don't bring a 

 live Ai)is dorsata into this country until you 

 know they can be domesticated. [You need 

 have no fears on that score.— Ed.J 



Many REPORT honey coming in well, espe- 

 cially in white-clover regions, but figures in 

 Honey Column are not very encouraging. Still, 

 I'd rather have big crop with little price than 

 little crop with big price. 



Bee wokk crowds so that I hid to get up at 

 3 this morning to finish thesL^ Straws. [I have 

 thought, doctor, that you seemed to be quite 

 busy; but you are rather reticent as to whether 

 or not you are getting honey. I suspect you 

 are.— Ed ] 



In grading honey, is there any need of de- 

 manding that both sides of a section be im- 

 maculately white in order to take highest 

 grading? When on the table, If the upper side 

 is white, does it matter if the other side be 

 darkened ? 



After SWARMS. Isaac Lundy says, in Re- 

 view, he prevents by putting a cone escape on 

 the mother colony. Why not? If no bees are 

 allowed to enter the hive about the time the 

 young queen emerges, but are compelled by the 

 escape to join the swarm, the destruction of 

 the other queens may be relied upon. 



E H. SciiAEFFLE finds that bottom starters 

 have a bad habit of curling over— p.486. If top 

 and bottom starter are only l{ inch apart, the 

 bees fasten them together the first thing, and 

 that prevents curling. [Bottom starters had a 

 fashion of curling over for us last year. It is 

 possible we made them too wide. Ours were 

 about }4 inch.— Ed.] 



Probabia' it will be the best way for founda- 

 tion-makers to paper foundation unless ordered 

 otherwise, but I think it will be economy, for 

 us Northerners at least, to order all founda- 



tion un papered. [If our customers will specify 

 whether they want their foundation papered 

 or unpapered we shall be very glad to comply 

 with their wishes, whichever way they may 

 choose.— Ed.] 



If THE FIGURES on p. 487 are correct, it's 

 ni cessary to make our bees' tongues only one- 

 ninth longer to bring them up to dorsata. It 

 ought not to be so vf^ry hard to accomplish 

 that, seeing there is considerable difference in 

 different colonies. [It only goes to show how 

 ridiculous are the claims that Apis dorsata 

 would have tongues so much longer that they 

 could reach into flora that our own bees could 

 not.— Ed.] 



Now WE HAVE the Medina mark— 1000 sec- 

 tions folded in 40 minutes, and 1000 starters put 

 in in 2 hours. Common people who reach the 

 half of that may be well satisfied. One thing 

 that helps the starter business in Medina is 

 that small starters are used and the sections 

 throi(;?i into a basket. With full starters they 

 sl^iould be placed directly in the supers— don't 

 know but they ought to anyway— and that 

 takes more time. 



E. E. Hasty ought to be drummed out of 

 the regiment — always raising troublesome 

 questions. In Revleiv he goes on after this 

 fashion: "Is it not usually the case with any 

 sample of honey, that its flavor is the joint re- 

 sult of two flavors — one secreted by the plant 

 and one contributed by the bee ? Is it not pos- 

 sible that most of the flavoring contributed by 

 the plant is taken out of the nectar the day it 

 is brought in, and stored in the bodies of the 

 bees, and restored later on in a somewhat al- 

 tered and less volatile form?" 



L. A. AspiNWALi. thinks the chief cause of 

 swarming an abundance of bees of all ages, 

 with the following as adjunct factors: "Tem- 

 perature, ventilation, drones, pollen, honey, the 

 influence of a honey-yield extending into a fail- 

 ure of ;the honey sources, the swarming-im- 

 pulse, the inherent tendency, and, lastly, that 

 under the circumstances of supersedure."— Re- 

 vieiv. [The sentence containing the "ad- 



