1911 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



177 



honey is sure to be carried up into the su- 

 pers, when the queens commence to "spread 

 themselves" in egg-laying. It does not 

 take much of the dark honey to mar the 

 flavor and dull the color of the choice orange 

 honey. As a rule, orange honey does not 

 candy easily. The past year was a marked 

 exception to the rule, however. It is prob- 

 ably due to the other honeys mixed in with 

 the orange. 



6. Andromeda (a scraggy shrub of the 

 heath family) . Blooms in the central and 

 northeastern part of the State for about four 

 weeks in March and early April; yields but 

 little three years out of four. The honey, 

 too, is reddish yellow, thick and pungent, 

 not very valuable as a surplus-honey plant. 



7. Gallberry or holly; a tree that grows in 

 almost all parts of Florida. The northern 

 portions, however, are more suited to its 

 best growth. Blossoms anywhere from mid- 

 March to early May, depending on the sea- 

 son and the latitude, but almost always 

 along with other honey-bearing sources, so 

 that the honey is practically never obtained 

 pure. For example, on the east coast, in 

 the neighborhood of Daytona, it blooms 

 along with the saw palmetto, and the result- 

 ing honey is a blend of both. Both happen, 

 luckily, to be good in flavor and alike in 

 color, so that the result is satisfactory. Were 

 it not a fine honey it would ruin many a 

 ton of choice palmetto honey. Even where 

 it is not sufficient for surplus, it comes at a 

 time favorable for breeding up colonies for 

 coming harvests of other sources. When 

 bees are working freely on the gallberry 

 their hum can be heard for many yards in 

 all directions. It is my observation that 

 the male holly seems to yield even more 

 abundantly than the female. 



8. Saw palmetto, commonly dubbed 

 "scrub" palmetto {Serenoa serrulata); a 

 shrub with creeping trunk, leaves erect and 

 fan-shaped, often standing six or seven feet 

 high. It thrives on sandy soils, moist pre- 

 ferred. Hummock lands are best for its 

 growth. It blooms from April, in the south, 

 to June in the northern sections 

 of its habitat. The blossoms are 

 small, greenish-white, arranged 

 on a plume-like stem that grows 

 out from a central bud in the 

 head of the plant, at the base of 

 the leaves. They are fragrant, 

 though not so large and showy 

 nor so aromatic as the blossoms 

 of the cabbage palmetto. The 

 honey from the saw palmetto is 

 lemon-yellow in color, thick and 



waxy, and of pronounced but delicious fla- 

 vor. Is not quite so transparent as pure or- 

 ange honey, but seldom candies, and makes 

 a choice table article. Mr. O. O. Poppleton 

 pronounces it the best honey in Florida, 

 ' ' with possibly the exception of tupelo. " It 

 is liked by almost every one at first taste; is 

 a trifle milder than even orange. My friend 

 Mr. Harold Hornor, Philadelphia's most en- 

 ergetic honey-dealer, tells me that he pre- 

 fers it to all other honeys from this State. 



He has bought it for years past. Forest 

 fires often damage wide tracts of this most 

 valuable bee forage, though only for that 

 year. This will be referred to later under 

 " Difficulties of Florida Bee-keeping." 

 De Land, Fla. 



To be continued. 



BEE-KEEPING AS A HOBBY. 



Tools and Dress. 



BY F. DUNDAS TODD. 



Chapter Five. 



The tools essential for the practice of bee- 

 keeping in a small way are neither numer- 

 ous nor expensive, consisting practically of 

 a smoker and a hive-tool. As the latter 

 may be dismissed in a few sentences we will 

 speak of it first. Its principal use is to force 

 apart the frames in the hive which are gen- 

 erally glued together by the adhesive men- 

 tioned in the previous chapter — its name, 

 by the way, being "propolis." As any 



Fig. 1.— Xlckeled-steel hive-tool, 

 piece of strong light metal is fit for this sim- 

 ple work we find many bee-keepers content 

 to use a screwdriver or inch wood chisel. 

 But once in a while we need something to 

 scrape away the accumulations of wax and 

 propolis from the frames, or the deposit of 

 dead bees and other waste matter on the 



Fijr. '2. —Hive-tool, one-third actual size. 



bottom-board, and then we need something 

 different. Many hive-tools have been in- 

 vented; but after trying most of them the 

 writer pins his faith emphatically to the 

 one illustrated in Fig. 1. All the uses to 

 which it can be put he has not yet discover- 

 ed, for it is as handy as a bench-tool as for 

 the purpose for which it was specially de- 

 signed. The lower figure in the cut shows 

 it;used for scraping frames; the upper, how 

 theiflat end is inserted between two hive- 



