GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



get at llieni. The surplus honey was secur- 

 ed by placing a hive over burning sulphur 

 and killing the bees. For years the increase 

 of the season would be killed off in this way, 

 leaving the usual number of six or eight 

 colonies to start in with the nest spring. 



I became mother's assistant. By the time 

 I was twelve I was making the bee-gums, 

 and a little later I was in the woods at the 

 proper season, when I could get off from 

 work hunting bee-trees. Father and the 

 other boys always went to town, four miles 

 away, on Saturday afternoons. Not so with 

 me. I spent this leisure time fishing, squir- 

 rel-hunting, bee-hunting, or in the shop 

 where the tools consisted of a saw, plane, 

 square, hammer, brace, bits, and a chisel 

 or two. 



One Saturday night father said to me, 

 " I wish you had been in town this after- 

 noon. A man took a bee-gum and knocked 

 it to pieces, put the combs in small frames, 

 and tacked strips across to hold it in ; put 

 these frames in a box, and smoked the bees 

 into it, and set them over in the corner of 

 the hotel yard. Nobody got stung, although 

 a big crowd was there. Then he told a lot 

 about bees." 



()i course 1 did not rest until I saw this 

 man and learned what he could do with 

 bees. It resulted m father's buying one nl' 

 his hives and a smoker, and a permit to 

 make and use the hives in the county where 

 we lived. (We afterward found that the 

 hive was not patented, and anybody who 

 chose made and used them.) The man who 

 sold these hives gave his name as Pickerel. 

 He was a red-headed, red-faced man, rather 

 witty, and very tactful. I remember one 

 boast he made was that he had been in every 

 State in the Union and in Canada; that he 

 had never voted, and had never paid any 

 tax. It was wonderful how he stirred that 

 region. People went wild over bees. With 

 the majority this interest was short-lived. 



At this time father bought out Mr. Phil- 

 lips and turned the bees over to me. My 

 interest grew, and so did my knowledge, 

 and my stock of bees and the profits too. 

 At the end of eight or ten years, when I 

 went away to college, there were between 

 seventy and eighty colonies in the yard. At 

 the end of three years there was not a colo- 

 ny living. Father said the worms and an 

 unusually hard winter killed them. 



Pauls Valley, Okla., Jan. 30, 1914. 



THE TEMPEMATUEE OF TME BEE COLONY 



Condensed by H. R. Calvert from U. S. Dept. of Agriculture Bulletin 96, covering experiments 

 conducted by Burton N. Gates, Ph.D., formerly Apicultural Assistant, Bureau of Entomology. 



The paper from which this summary is 

 made was written to fill a need among bee- 

 keepers for more accurate knowledge of the 

 temperatures and changes in weight of colo- 

 nies of bees, particularly during the winter. 

 Such knowledge of the changes in tempera- 

 ture and weights is helpful in a study of 

 methods for successfully coping with one of 

 the greatest difficulties which the beekeeper 

 has to meet — the wintering problem. 



The scope of the work accomplished is 

 indicated by the following figures: 



Period of experimentation, Oct. 22, 1907, 

 to Sept. 26, 1908. 



Number of observations, 25y6-(— 



Number of separate readings, 20,000-f-. 



The apparatus included a finely adjusted, 

 specially constructed platform scales which 

 registered with a sensitivity of 10 grams 

 and a maximum of 200 kilograms. Seven 

 mercury thermometers of the incubator type 

 wliich registered to a fifth of a degree, and 

 were graduated to the Centigrade scale; a 

 ten-frame liive of five stories, including all 

 its appliances — feeder, apparatus to be used 

 in emergencies which was stored in the low- 

 er story, two colonies of Caucasian bees, 



and a check colony in an observation hive 

 placed near the colony on the scales. 



Four thermometers were inserted at regu- 

 lar interv,als between the central combs, a 

 fifth placed at the rear of the hive between 

 the third and fourth combs from the side, 

 this one to represent the temperature of the 

 margin of the cluster; a sixth, inserted 

 beneath the frames through a collar, and the 

 seventh suspended close to the hive in such 

 a way as to register the temperature of the 

 air which surrounded the apparatus. 



The apparatus was installed in a shed on 

 a third-story back piazza in southwest Wash- 

 ing-ton, D. C. In July, 1908, it was neces- 

 sary to transport the experiment to College 

 Park, Md. This, however, was found to 

 have in no way affected the results. 



Since none of the instruments recorded 

 automatically, readings of both weights and 

 temperatures were taken at least every hour 

 throughout the working day; and, while the 

 hive was being manipulated, every half -hour 

 or quarter-hour. On the average of about 

 once in three weeks, by means of assistance, 

 it was possible to take consecutive readings 

 for a period of two or three days. Temper- 



