78 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Feb. 1. 



attachment, but it has more perpendicular 

 weight. A section an inch high will ship safe- 

 ly if secured at top and bottom with no side 

 attachment, but one ten inches high would 

 come to grief. See ? [Carrying the sentence 

 to its logical conclusion, perhaps it is a little 

 strong ; but what I meant to convey was that 

 a section 4X5 will stand more hard usage in 

 shipping than a section 4^4 square. — Ed.] 



German bee-keepers are somewhat moved 

 over the death of Die Nordlinger Bienenzeit- 

 ung, at one time the ablest of the German bee- 

 journals, and the oldest in Germany, having 

 lived 55 years (wasn't it the oldest bee-journal 

 in the world?). Its able editors were succeed- 

 ed by Herr Dickel, who used its pages to advo- 

 cate the theory that all the eggs laid by a queen 

 are alike, and that workers can rear a queen 

 out of drone eggs, and then it died. [The 

 demise of this, the oldest of all bee -jour- 

 nals, was talked over after the sessions of 

 the Geneva convention. It seemed rather too 

 bad that a journal with such a history could 

 not have continued its name at least. If it had 

 lived in this country, at least one of its cotem- 

 poraries would have jumped at the chance of 

 buying its name. — Ed.] 



R. C. AiKiN is striking some heavy blows 

 nowadays, in Progressive, in favor of selling 

 honey in the candied state. The fact that he 

 has succeeded — grandly succeeded — in it him- 

 self, is an argument hard to be overcome by 

 those who say the thing can not be done. If 

 I had a trade in extracted honey that I expect- 

 ed to close with the year, I'd sell honey only 

 while liquid, gathering it up from time to time 

 to melt ; but if I expected to stay in the same 

 place for three years, I'd train my customers 

 to do their own melting. Might be tough the 

 first year, but I'd be solid with my customers 

 after that. [There is no denying the fact that 

 Aikin has done some grand work in demon- 

 strating that there is a sure and steady market 

 for granulated honey. It was uphill work with 

 him at first, but now his customers expect it, 

 and some even prefer it to candied. — Ed.] 



The Chicago Record reports 220,518 U. S. 

 licenses for the manufacture and sale of liquors, 

 and counts three persons employed for each 

 license — a low estimate (some brewers and 

 distillers employ several thovisand men), mak- 

 ing one liquor-seller to ever}' 114 of the entire 

 population. Yet there are people who would 

 utterly wipe out so important an industry, 

 throwing out of comfortable employment 

 about one man out of 23. Just think of it ! 

 [Yes; and, unfortunately, there are hun- 

 dreds and thousands of people who, if they do 

 not really believe such logic, try to make oth- 

 ers believe it. But the tide is changing, and 

 the time will surely come when such talk will 

 be regarded as the rankest heresy. Believe it? 

 I believe it as much as I believe there will be 

 a sun to-morrow, even if I can not see it. — Ed.] 



Mr. Editor, on p. 54 you suggest a y& strip 

 for the Doolittle division feeder, "suppose 

 bees did get drowned." That % strip in 

 a l^-inch space may get to one side, leaving 

 a Yi space. Now, suppose bees get drowned 

 in that yi space; wouldn't it be well to put 



in a %-{nc\i strip? "No sense in supposing 

 that ? ' ' Now, look here ; you never will be fair. 

 I've just as good a right to suppose they'll 

 drown in a J^ space as you have to suppose 

 they'll drown in a 1^ space. Suppose we 

 don't suppose foolish things to take up room 

 in either case. [No danger of bees drowning, 

 when by a little squirming they can reach some 

 solid object. If a bee gets out into the middle 

 of a pan of syrup it will tire itself out, often, 

 before it can reach the side of the pan ; but if it 

 is within an inch of the side, or of some object, 

 it will very quickly get on terra firma — Ed.} 

 You HINT rather broadly, Mr. Editor, p. 59, 

 that I ought to keep away from Colorado. 

 Now, really, if I should settle down with my 

 bees next door to Rauchfuss or some other 

 nice fellow, do you think there would be any 

 thing criminal in that? [Nothing criminal 

 about it at all, but you would get into trouble 

 all the same. I know of one bee-keeper who 

 did that very thing by setting an apiary down 

 near one of the yards of the Rauchfuss broth- 

 ers. The latter simply made their yard up 

 into powerful extracting colonies, and then 

 brought in more bees. The result was, that the 

 other fellow, who had come in to divide the 

 profits with his little eight-frame comb-honey 

 colonies, did not get much of a show. Those 

 powerful jumbo colonies simply ran the little 

 fellows out of business. If I am correct, the 

 interloper moved away soon after, as he con- 

 cluded there was not much honey in that local- 

 ity.— Ed.] 



^^rCKlJSTGS 



d/-/fOM OUN NEIGHBORS FIELDS. 



Our coldest month is very warm, 



The air is full of fog ; 

 The drizzly rain comes slowly down, 



And next we'll hear the frog. 



BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW. 

 The issue for January is an excellent one. 

 Mr. Hutchinson's remarks on buying a good 

 camera are worth all his paper costs for a year. 

 He devotes over a page to the new or proposed 

 spelling, seeing little in it but a change, the 

 trouble of which would not be offset by the 

 very slight shortening of a few words, which, 

 however, he says, is not phonetic spelling aft- 

 er all. 



BRITISH BEE JOURNAL. 



Concerning the preparation of honey for 

 market, the editor points out some evils that 

 are not unknown on this side of the ocean. 

 He says : 



Numbers of bee-keepers— many of whom are men 

 not short of common sense— utterly lack the simplest 

 aptitude for preparing honey for sale. Careless to a 

 degree, they will use old, soiled, and dirty sections for 

 storing the new season's honey in, the very look of 

 which would cause their rejection for use on any de- 

 cent table. If sent by rail they are often packed so- 

 badly as to be irretrievably damaged in transit, and. 

 so on. 



