1899 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



885 



I do not suppose my queens are different in 

 this respect from those of other bee-keepers ; 

 consequently, many queens may be lost in 

 just this way because their owner never thinks 

 of the matter, and never suspects the true 

 cause of the loss of a colony during the win- 

 ter. A neighbor, with whom I was talking on 

 this subject recently, told me that last fall, be- 

 ing unable, on account of ill health, to take 

 the last honey off, himself, he let a hired man 

 do the work. The supers were taken off with 

 a rush, and piled up in the honey-room. The 

 bees in them were only partly smoked out, and 

 afterward liberated, as they collected in great 

 numbers on the screen door. No thought 

 was given to queens that were supposed to be 

 in their appropriate place in the lower hive. 

 During the winter he lost a number of colo- 

 nies, and he now thinks the cause was the re- 

 moval of the queens with the honey, and the 

 failure to notice their loss until he found the 

 colonies " gone up." 



Numbers on hives are valuable in many re- 

 spects besides the one above described. In 

 keeping a record of queens and colonies, in 

 the general apiary work, in swarming time, 

 and in many other ways, the numbers are a 

 help. I should find it impossible to manage 

 an apiary properly without them. Numbered 

 tags may be made of tin or wood, painted 

 white, and the numbers marked on them 

 with small brass stencils, such as the inter- 

 changeable lock stencils. It is but little work 

 to prepare them, and they will last for many 

 years, and pay for themselves in the conven- 

 ience they afford for doing things with accura- 

 cy. I have numbers on many of my hives 

 that are twenty years old, and as good, appar- 

 ently, as the day they were made. 



Independence, Cal., Oct. 2. 



A NEW RECORD. 



How W. L. Coggshall's Extracting-team Made it. 

 BY HARRY HOWE. 



We have so got in the habit of thinking that 

 our extracting- machines are the best in use 

 that we rather expect to hold all the records for 

 rapid extracting. In order to bring the mat- 

 ter to a focus I have prepared this account of 

 our best record, so that any one who has beat- 

 en it may stand up and tell us how it was done. 



Just now, Aug. 25, we are in the height of 

 the buckwheat harvest, and are taking from 

 3000 to 5000 pounds of honey a day. 



On the morning of this particular day Fred 

 and I went to Ellis, 15 miles south, on our 

 wheels. By some mistake there was not store 

 room enough there for all the honey, so we 

 had to leave 25 colonies until we could get 

 back with some more kegs, which I did the 

 next day. We got off 1500 lbs. before we 

 stopped. This left us ready to start away ear- 

 ly in the afternoon, so we concluded to go to 

 the Etna yard and work there the rest of the 

 day. This place is 5 miles northeast of Ellis, 

 over a high range of hills, in the next valley. 



As we passed through the village of Etna on 



the way to the bees, Fred spied a watermelon 

 in front of a store. 



"Harry," said he, "if you will carry that 

 melon to the bee-yard, on your wheel, I will 

 buy it." 



In a very short time that melon was har- 

 nessed to the handle-bar of my Remington, 

 and on its way through town, to the great as- 

 tonishment of the grocer, who evidently did 

 not know the carrying capacity of a wheel. 



The Etna yard is about a mile from the vil- 

 lage, back in a piece of woods. On our arri- 

 val at the bee-yard it was our turn to be sur- 

 prised, for we were greeted by a series of "war- 

 whoops," and a command to stand and deliver 

 that melon. There was no bee-hive handy to 

 throw at them, so we had to make terms. 

 Our assailants turned out to be Harry B. and 

 Archie, another extracting-team who had just 

 arrived with a load of kegs. While we ate the 

 melon we laid out a plan of campaign and 

 assigned each to a station. These prelimina- 

 ries having been attended to we prepared for 

 war, which was declared at 4:15. 



The bees here are in eight-frame hives, but 

 the frames are longer and deeper than the 

 regular Simplicity, so the eight frames are 

 about equal to nine Simplicity frames. The 

 supers had seven frames in the eight spaces. 

 The combs were capped over nearly their en- 

 tire surface, and bulged some from the wide 

 spacing. 



The extractor was near one of our regular 

 four-frame machines, which have often been 

 described. Harry B. took off and carried in 

 the honey, replacing the filled combs with 

 empty ones all the while. Fred turned the 

 extractor ; Archie drew off the honey, and 

 filled the kegs, but was too light to roll them 

 away, which one or another of the boys did 

 for him. My especial work was to wield the 

 uncapping-knife. 



Throughout the entire trial I did not have to 

 wait once for honey, nor did I get more than 

 four or five combs ahead of the extractor. If 

 I could have uncapped faster we should have 

 made the record still larger. 



At 5: 30, an hour and a quarter after start- 

 ing, the last comb was extracted. The esti- 

 mated amount of honey was 1400 pounds — 

 over 1100 pounds per hour. By six we were 

 all ready to start for home, ten miles away. 

 We put the honey into kegs that run about 

 220 lbs. net. Of these we filled six, and had a 

 kegful of cappings which drained out another 

 hundred pounds or more. 



In cases like this, where there is a lot of 

 cappings to be disposed of in a short time, we 

 take one head out of a keg and lay a two-inch 

 strip across the open end. The cappings then 

 fall directly into the keg. When they are all 

 in, a piece of wire cloth is placed over the 

 head, and a hoop driven down over it, and the 

 whole outfit turned upside down to drain. 

 Next time around, the dry cappings are put 

 into a box, and the keg filled up again. \ 



Fred Munson, the son of a neighbor bee- 

 keeper, weighs 130 lbs. ; Archie Coggshall, 

 W. L,. Coggshall's youngest, can push down 

 70. My working weight is 115 lbs. Some of 

 our other records are 900 lbs. in an hour for 



