GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Jan. 1. 



wood ones. It is cheap, as made by the E. L. 

 Goold Co., because they have a good deal of 

 sheet metal that is used for protecting certain 

 packages, and this metal is practically good 

 for nothing otherwise. — Ed.] 



Harry Howe will be after you for libel, 

 Mr. Editor, for heading his article "Black 

 Bees Preferred." He says he can work faster 

 with black bees, but in the same paragraph 

 practically says the Italians or Carniolans 

 worked faster for him. He savs that, when 

 convinced that fancy stock will get enough 

 more honey to pay, as he was the past season, 

 of course he'll have it. And Coggshall will 

 spend *50 in the spring in the same way. No, 

 Harry's no longer a " black " man. [It seems 

 to me that Harry is sort o' on the fence. — Ed.] 



Ye editor wonders, p. 933, why our house 

 doesn't look as well outside as in. Well, the 

 women run the inside ; but I must draw the 

 line somewhere, and I still have some control 

 outside. I believe in a man standing up for 

 his rights. [The line is seldom drawn quite 

 so sharply as on the outside of the rear of 

 one's house. Yes, I am a firm believer in 

 men's rights — around the house, and in it too. 

 There is one " right " I do not have in the 

 house — that is, the liberty of throwing my 

 coat and hat wherever I please, or of leaving 

 books and magazines where I sat last. — Ed.] 



Doolittee gives in Progressive a plan to 

 prevent swarming that looks good. When 

 the yield is on, and a tendency to swarm, cage 

 queen in hive. Ten days later remove her 

 and cage in the same place a young laying 

 queen, with candy enough so she'll be liberat- 

 ed in about two days, cutting all queen-cells. 

 The bees will do the rest. [Yes, it does look 

 very promising ; but I wonder how it would 

 work generally to let loose the same queen 

 back in her old hive. I suspect, however, 

 that a you rig queen would do a better job at 

 destroying the cells, while the old one might 

 accept the situation as a preparation for 

 swarming; and swarm she and the bees would, 

 perhaps shortly after. — Ed.] 



I MUST have BEEN very busy when GLEAN- 

 INGS for Apr. 15 came, not to notice on p. 306 

 the assurance of the editor in claiming M. D. 

 Andes on his side in the show of hands for 

 section-holders and T supers. Mr. Andes dis- 

 tinctly says that he prefers wide frames to 

 any other arrangement. O Ernest ! [I turned 

 away back to page 306, and I found that Mr. 

 Andes says : "If you were to make me a pres- 

 ent of 100 complete T supers I would not use 

 them so long as I could get wide frames. I 

 prefer the wide frames to any other arrange- 

 ment for comb honey, except, perhaps, the 

 Danzy super." The Danzv super uses sec- 

 tion-holders pure and simple; in fact, Mr. D. 

 adopted them after seeing how nicely they 

 worked in our supers. But wide frames are 

 section-holders without top-bars. I still claim 

 that Mr. Andes is on my side. O doctor ! — 

 Ed.] 



" When a queen is discovered being ' ball- 

 ed ' she should be released without delay, 

 either by pulling the ' ball ' of bees away from 

 the queen singly, or in extreme cases by im- 



mersing queen and bees in water till the bees 

 are forced by the law of self-preservation to 

 release the queen." — British Bee Journal. 

 Isn't smoking better than either way ? Hold 

 the smoker far enough from the queen so the 

 smoke will be cold. Hot smoke will make 

 the bees sting the queen. [I have tried all 

 three of the methods spoken of above, and as 

 a general rule I prefer the last named. But I 

 have had cases where the ball of angry bees 

 would not yield even to smoke. I have then 

 picked the ball up by the wings of one bee, 

 and dropped it into a basin of water. So far 

 as I can remember the ball would always melt 

 away immediately, and the bees would swim 

 for the edges of the basin. — Ed.] 



When I looked at those two sections on p. 

 914 I said they were worse as to pop-holes 

 than thousands I had produced of the old 

 kind, but I suppose the shadow exaggerates 

 the holes in the picture. [Those two sections 

 were not introduced to show pop holes or no 

 pop-holes, but only the slight ridging that 

 was just barely perceptible in sections I found 

 at Mr. Morton's. By the way, the Morton 

 fence is not constructed in a manner calculated 

 to do away with pop-holes. The posts or 

 cross-cleats run clear up the full length of the 

 section ; and as the)* are 3 4 ' inch wide they 

 practically secure the same result, so far as 

 pop-holes are concerned, as the old style scor- 

 ed-out section with an ordinary separator. If 

 the fences are made as shown on page 912, 

 Fig. 3, at A, results will be secured more like 

 the bottom engraving shown on page 920, for 

 this honey was produced with just such a 

 fence. While I do not claim that a fence con- 

 structed as in Fig. 3 will do away with pop- 

 holes in plain sections (I should be very fool- 

 ish if I did), from what I have been able to 

 observe it will go a long way toward that de- 

 sideratum. — Ed. ] 



BEE-KEEPING IN CUBA. 



The Desolate Condition of the Island ; How the 



Starving Ones are Fed ; Reported by the 



Special Correspondent of Gleanings. 



BY W. W. SOMERFORD. 



[A few weeks ago I stated that Mr. Somer- 

 ford was going to take a trip to Cuba, with 

 his camera. As he had kept bees extensively 

 on that island, and as he was about to visit it 

 again, I arranged for a series of articles. He 

 is to describe the conditions there existing, 

 and state whether bee-keeping there will pay ; 

 tell us about the competition of Cuban honey; 

 average yields per year, etc. We have just 

 received the first article, and along with it 



