974 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



GENEKAL COEMESPONDENCE 



NOTES OF THE SEAS 



BY JAMES A, GREEN 



The new power extractor, with friction 

 drive, has proven very satisfactory, and I 

 think the friction drive is much better for 

 an extractor than gearing. The unfortunate 

 thing this season has been that the extractor 

 has had so little to do. Only once in my 

 thirteen years' residence in Colorado have 

 I seen a poorer honey season. Yet I have 

 never known bees to be in better condition 

 in the spring, nor the prospects for a good 

 honey season to be better than this year. 

 Truly beekeeping is an uncertain occupa- 

 tion. The producers of extracted honey 

 have a little; but most of the comb-honey 

 men in this part of the State have had 

 practically nothing in the way of a crop. 

 What little surplus my bees stored was al- 

 most entirely from sweet clover, alfalfa 

 yielding almost nothing, and I believe this 

 was generally true. 



EUROPEAN FOUL BROOD OR POISONING? 



The letter from Dr. E. F. Phillips, on 

 page 615, expresses his belief that the loss 

 of bees that has been so serious in this 

 part of Colorado is due to European foul 

 brood rather than to poisoning, as has been 

 the general belief. While I do not doubt 

 that Dr. Phillips may be correct in his 

 diagnosis of European foul brood in the 

 sample of brood sent him, he is certainly 

 wrong in attributing our losses here to that 

 cause. 



I lost a number of colonies myself in 

 1912 in two of my apiaries. In the spring 

 of 1913 I bought the remains of an apiary 

 that had been reduced from over 200 colo- 

 nies to less than 50, the outfit including a 

 number of sets of brood-combs on which the 

 bees had died. In none of the colonies that 

 died was there any thing to indicate any 

 disease of the brood further than the occa- 

 sional case of American foul brood which is 

 always with us. The only brood that died 

 was what was chilled or starved for the lack 

 of mature bees to care for it. The surviving 

 colonies, moved to other localities, nearly all 

 built up in good shape and gathered a good 

 crop of honey in 1913. Most of the combs 

 from the dead colonies were used for either 

 brood or extracting combs, without trans- 

 mitting disease thereby. The letter by James 

 G. Brown, page 641, describes the situation 

 very accurately as he has found it in Mon- 

 trose County. In Mesa County our greatest 

 loss was in 1912. After the losses of that 



season, most of the beekeepers in the or- 

 chard districts near Grand Junction and 

 eastward either quit or moved their bees 

 elsewhere. It is rather unfortunate that 

 enough remained to prevent a thorough 

 demonstration of what an entire lack of 

 bees would do to the orchardists. 



The heading of Mr. Brown's article is 

 misleading in calling this " A New Danger 

 from Spraying." It is an old story with us. 

 In fact, I wrote of it several years ago in 

 Gleanings when I was the editor of one of 

 its departments. It seems difficult to get 

 some people to comprehend that there is 

 any danger to the beekeeper from spraying 

 except during fruit bloom. Only once have 

 I ever known of much damage to bees 

 through the spraying of fruit-trees before 

 the blossoms had fallen, and that was a 

 trifle compared to the losses we have had 

 since from the poisoned spray falling on the 

 blossoms of plants growing under or near 

 the fruit-trees at the time of the later 

 sprayings. One of the heaviest losers, Mr. 

 John Wallace, has lately sent samples of 

 brood from one of the depopulated colonies 

 to Washington, and the report of the au- 

 thorities was that no disease could be found. 



PEAR-BLIGHT NOT TRACEABLE TO BEES. 



I wish to corroborate the statements of 

 L. V. Dix, page 641, in regard to pear- 

 blight. I have raised pears for a number 

 of years, and live in a district which ships 

 hundreds of carloads of pears annually. I 

 have had some serious attacks of pear- 

 blight in my own trees, and have seen a 

 great deal of it elsewhere, even to the de- 

 struction of whole orchards, but I have 

 never seen the slightest indication that bees 

 are in any way responsible for the spread 

 of the disease. I have never seen bees 

 working on blighted branches, nor ever seen 

 on such branches any thing that it seemed 

 to me would be attractive to bees. Pear- 

 blight sometimes spreads at an alarming 

 rate under some conditions, appearing to be 

 governed mostly by weather conditions ; but 

 the cure of it is simple when properly done, 

 and the man who cannot get rid of it is too 

 careless to be a fruit-grower. The cure 

 consists simply in cutting off all blighted 

 branches at least a foot below any sign of 

 infection, doing a careful and thorough job, 

 and keeping tools and the cut stub disinfect- 

 ed by swabbing them with a 1-to-lOOO solu- 



