1899 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



473 



rEDlTORlAC 



^ ;c.r b Ioot 



I found the first basswood blossom open 

 June 14 ; and to-day, the 15th, the bees are it 

 work on it. — A. I. R. 



Reports from various portions of the coun- 

 try are very flattering. White clover seems 

 to be out in abundance; and by the way or- 

 ders are pouring in for sections, foundation, 

 etc., it would seem as if honey were coming 

 from somewhere. The Leahy Mfg. Co., fur- 

 ther south, where the season is earlier, write 

 that they are swamped with orders. This 

 would seem to indicate lhat the flow of honey 

 where the season is further advanced than 

 here, is copious. If it should prove to be the 

 same further north, with us, we'll not com- 

 plain. It's too early to count our chickens. 

 We may yet have a failure here in the North. 



S. A. NIVER AT MEDINA. 

 We have just been having a two-days' visit 

 with S. A. Niver, the hone} -salesman, former- 

 ly of Groton, N. Y., a man who needs no in- 

 troduction to the readtrs of Gleanings. Just 

 before leaving Medina he wrote a note to W. 

 L. Coggshall, one of his old neighbors, a bee- 

 keeper who owns and operates from 1000 to 

 1200 colonies. This he showed me, saying, 

 " You can see what I have written to Lamar." 

 On reading the same I begged the use of it in 

 this number of Gleanings, as it would be a 

 nice introduction to some dialog matter that 

 will appear in these columns soon. Well, 

 here is a copy of the letter : 



Friend Lamar: — You see I am holding forth at Root- 

 vine; and during a conversation with Ernest I discov- 

 ered a stenographer was taking it all down for publi- 

 cation. I may have made a bad break in quoting you, 

 but I guess you can stand it. 



Ernest and I wheeled out to Vernon Burt's last even- 

 ing, and found some of his colonies with two supers 

 on, and booming on white clover, and basswood right 

 on hand, although there is but little of it here. A. i. is 

 so busy with strawberries hy the bushel that he fairly 

 stutters. I am having a boss good time, any way. 

 " How are they coming? " S. A. Niver. 



Medina, June 14. 



Our stenographer, by pre-arrangement, has 

 the whole thing down in shorthand, verbatim; 

 and you know Niver is one of those chaps 

 who, when he gets his tongue balanced, as 

 Harry Howe says, knows how to talk. As he 

 has had a very extensive experience in pro- 

 ducing and selling honey, he has indeed given 

 some very interesting and valuable matter. As 

 to the "bad break," we will leave him to 

 fight it out with Coggshall later. 



"PERSISTING IN ERROR." 



From the Department of Criticism, by R. L. 

 Taylor, in the Bee keepers' Review for June, I 

 take the following extract: "The editor of 

 Gleanings, p. 34S. joins Dr. Miller in think- 

 ing that I am too much inclined to hold on to 

 error against light. What errors, my breth- 

 ren? " Then Mr. Taylor enumerates several 

 opinions that he has held, but which Dr. Mil- 



ler and I may possibly regard as ' ' errors 

 against light." Among them he says he pre- 

 fers a hand-hole to a, hive rather than a cleat 

 clear across it. I could hardly class this as an 

 error in any event, for it would be simply a 

 difference of opinion. In this particular case 

 I incline to the preference of Mr. Taylor rath- 

 er than to that of Dr. Miller ; but I prefer to 

 either a combination of short cleat and hand- 

 hole. Mr. Taylor further says he believes a 

 queenless colony having larvae and eggs of all 

 ages, left to itself, will raise inferior queens. 

 So far as I can see, there is no error in this, 

 from my point of view, because I partly agree 

 with him. And, again, he believes "that the 

 spores of foul brood boiled fifteen minutes in 

 honey will lose their vitality." Right here I 

 believe our friend is stubbornly holding on to 

 an opinion which, if believed in by his read- 

 ers, would do harm rather than good. Fui- 

 ther down the page Mr. Taylor says he does 

 not take issue with Mr. Cowan on the ques- 

 tion of boiling when it refers to 212° only, but 

 that he, Cowan, does not " touch the essential 

 matter at a single point ; " that the question 

 is one of boiling in honey. Referring back 

 again to page 348, Gleanings, Mr. Cowan, in 

 his note to myself, says : " I got Gleanings 

 for March loth last evening, and have gone 

 through the correspondence about foul brood, 

 and I think you are perfectly justified in rec- 

 ommending a long boiling of honey so as to 

 render it safe to give back to bees." The ital- 

 ics above are mine ; and Mr. Taylor will see 

 that Mr. Cowan not only indorses what I have 

 said on this question, but specifically talks 

 about " boiling honey." 



Another probable error of Mr. Taylor's, but 

 a harmless one, is that in relation to color and 

 the attitude of bees toward it. If our critic 

 will read over the evidence as Mr. Hutchinson 

 has done, he ought to be convinced, for Mr. 

 Hutchinson says : " It does seem as if the tes- 

 timony given in proof of this aversion (to 

 black) is incontrovertible." 



The points on which Mr. Taylor and myself 

 disagree are very few indeed ; and some of 

 these may be ascribed to locality; for instance, 

 the one regarding large or small brood-nests 

 for honey. 



LARGE HIVES AND THE DISCUSSION OF THEM. 



The editor of the Rcvieiv thinks that the 

 subject of large and small hives has been dis- 

 cussed about long enough. To my notion we 

 are just now getting hold of facts. W. H. 

 Eagerty, of Kansas, in the American Bee 

 Journal, after having used both large and 

 small hives, says, "I will take the large one 

 every time. . . . And while it takes some 

 time for the bees to build combs in the brood- 

 chamber, they get there every time," and 

 then he winds up as follows : 



But take a hive holding 10 frames 10 inches or more 

 deep, and 18 inches long each, and with a good queen 

 — if there is any honey to be had, you will be very apt 

 to get \our share of it, and you will not have to lie 

 awake nights figuring how to have your colony strong 

 enough just at the right time. Your only wonder will 

 be at the stream of bees as they come and go at the 

 entrance of the hive, how the box can contain them. 



I have kept bees for several years, and never ex- 



