GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



Jan. 1 



Bee-keeping Among The 

 Rockies 



By WESI.EY Foster, Boulder, Colo. 



Dr. Miller, I fear that even the editor has 

 missed it this time in saying that Oliver 

 Foster has been spoken of by me as "my 

 father," p. 646, Oct. 15. Now, I have a fa- 

 ther whose name is A. F. Foster, and he is a 

 brother of Oliver Foster, so you may figure 

 out the relationship. The Foster family 

 have been bee-keepers since 1861, when 

 father bought a hive of bees in a patent 

 hive (with county rights to make them and 

 sell them) of Edwin France. Father, in his 

 first season of bee-keejiing, got something 

 like 140 pounds of honey from two colonies, 

 and sold it all at about 25 cents a pourd. 

 My uncle Oliver, however, has been a bee- 

 keeper for a longer term of years than any 

 of the rest of the Fosters. I think legend 

 has it that he got his start in bees by dig- 

 ging out a bumble-bees' nest in a red-clover 

 field, putting the nest, bees and all, into a 

 cigar-box and bringing them home to occu- 

 py a position on the window-sill of his room 

 where he could watch their actions more or 

 less by lifting the lid of the cigar-box and 

 taking a peek. Any way, this swarm of 

 bumble-bees now has increased (oh the mar- 

 vel!) into something like two thousand col- 

 onies of bees located in various places of the 

 irrigated West. 



UNITED EFFORT TO FIGHT THE GRASS- 

 HOPPER PEST. 



A movement is on foot to get something 

 like ten or twenty thousand dollars appro- 

 priated by the State of Colorado with which 

 to fight the grasshopper pest, which was the 

 main cause of the honey failure in North- 

 ern Colorado this past season. The bee- 

 keepers are letting their influence be felt 

 along with the farmers and gardeners and 

 fruit-growers. If we work concertedly for 

 an adequate appropriation we shall get it, 

 and the use of this fund under the direction 

 of the Agricultural college will mean the 

 difference between success and failure in 

 years to come. When one sees orchards en- 

 tirely shorn of their leaves and fruit, and 

 the bark of many of the limbs and twigs 

 eaten off, it makes him feel that our real 

 enemies are insect pests and not some for- 

 eign nation. We are recognizing very fast 

 where our danger lies, and, as a people, are 

 overcoming obstacles that will make for bet- 

 ter and worthier living. 



REQUEENINQ. 



Not long ago I was talking with a bee- 

 keeper who never clips his queens nor 

 spends much time in looking after the age 

 of his queens. He trusts to the bees for all 

 this. He told me that no doubt he could 

 get a higher average yield of honey, but that 

 this work would require the time he would 



spend in caring for a hundred hives of bees, 

 so that if the extra hundred hives of bees 

 make the difference in yield, he had lost 

 nothing, and has kept his work in a simpler 

 form. I am not sure this policy would do 

 for all of us; but this bee-keeper makes it 

 go very well; and as long as he can succeed 

 better than the average lie is not very like- 

 ly to change his course. 



BEES NEED WATER, EVEN WHEN HALF- 

 AND-HALF SYRUP IS FED. 



Why do bees visit watering - troughs, 

 streams, etc., when feeding a sugar syrup 

 made half and half, and this in August and 

 September? One would think that they 

 would have a great abundance of water 

 from handling this comparatively thin syr- 

 up. The bees went in search of water this 

 year after feeding commenced, whereas up 

 to the time feeding began they were not no- 

 ticed (to speak of) around the watering- 

 troughs. But can the bees extract any 

 amount of water from this syrup"^ Might 

 it not be necessary for them to carry the 

 syrup some distance before any water could 

 be made available for the use of the bees in 

 the hive? The syrup stimulated brood-rear- 

 ing; and, in order to care for the young 

 brood, water froni outside had to be brought 

 in. This brings up some interesting ques- 

 tions. 



"JUMPING" THE PRICE TO LARGE BUYERS 

 RESULTS IN NO SALES. 



I believe that bee-men are as fine a class 

 of people as we have; but, in common with 

 other rural and semi-rural dwellers, we have 

 some "queernesses." For instance, when a 

 buyer writes, asking quotations on a large 

 amount of honey — perhaps as much as or 

 more than we have, so that, in order to sell 

 to him, we would have to buy of our neigh- 

 bor bee-keepers — we think because he is in 

 a large city, and has a good market, he will 

 pay a higher price than the merchants near- 

 er home, so we ask him a price higher 

 than what we have been getting from local 

 merchants in single-case lots. Of course, 

 ordinarily we do not sell to the large buyer 

 when adopting these tactics, for the large 

 buyer figures on buying as cheap as others 

 if "not cheaper. So we keep our honey 

 that we have jumped the price on, and con- 

 tinue to sell it a case at a time for the same 

 old figure, and very likely the large buyer 

 would have taken the whole crop at the fig- 

 ure, and saved us all the bother of small or- 

 ders; but, no! we have not got over the idea 

 that, if a man comes in search of an article 

 in large quantity, we can jump the price up 

 and get away with a little extra money. 

 The man who lists his house for sale, and 

 then every time a prospective buyer comes 

 to look at it jumps the price, generally nev- 

 er sells. It's better to have one uniform 

 price, and not try to get a little extra mon- 

 ey from a man because he wants what we 

 have. The chances are that he knows the 

 rock-bottom price better than we do. 



