104 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



Feb. 15 



Fig. 1.— C'has. Pieicy, an electrician at the Naval Station, Mare 

 Island, California, who finds time to keep up a little 

 apiary in spite of the difficulties encountered. 



it, and it thrives there in great profusion, 

 covering bushes, fences, and old walls with a 

 solid blanket of bright green. By August 

 20 it begins to bloom, and soon the whole 

 vine is covered with a small white bloom. 

 The bees make from it, while it lasts, a light 

 amber honey of fine quality. 



It was here near the City of 

 Mexico that Mr. Carl LudlofT 

 made his first attempt at ex- 

 tensive bee-keeping in the re- 

 public. He is now located at 

 Irapuato, and in a later article 

 I will have more to say about 

 him and his "Simplex hive." 

 Mr. Ijudloff might be called 

 the pioneer of intense bee- 

 keeping on the highlands of 

 Mexico. His experiments at 

 Mexico City were a failure. He 

 organized a stock company 

 with a capital of twelve or thir- 

 teen thousand dollars, and put 

 in a large apiary in the type of 

 hive shown in Fig. 5. These 

 hives were about nine feet long, 

 and contained as many as sixty 

 frames. It will be seen at a 

 glance that the hive is very 

 much on the order of the Hu- 

 ber hive, shown on pages 248 

 and 249 of A B C and X Y Z 

 of Bee Culture. It seems to 

 have been the idea of Mr. Lud- 

 lofT that, the larger the colony 

 got, the more frames he would 

 give to it by simply shifting his 

 division - boards, and that he 

 would in this way do away with 

 swarming entirely. No doubt 

 this arrangement helped some- 

 what to keep down the swarm- 

 ing; but he still had swarms. 

 The cover or case for the hives, 

 which may be seen standing 

 on its end in the picture, is a 

 double-walled chalT-filled con- 

 cern, and, no doubt, very warm; but as the 

 walls both inside and out were nothing but 

 cloth, the whole had to be covered with a 

 shingle cover as shown in position on the 

 unopened hives. 



After some five or six years of failure near 

 the city, Ludloff & Co. moved their bees 



Fig. 2.— Chas. Piercy's Apiary, Mare Island, California, 



