DECEMBER 15, 1914 



983 



the hive or radiating" chamber part of the 

 day, and shifting to the other side during 

 the other half of the day; that is, of course, 

 provided the hives stand north and south, 

 thus reversing the air currents, as is evident. 

 Twenty colonies wintered in this manner 

 came through in most beautiful shape; in 

 fact, one colony of only three frames ap- 



peared as strong as when put in in the fall. 

 Seventeen colonies were again wintered 

 in the same manner during the winter of 

 1913, and came through in fine order, even 

 though in many cases their stores were so 

 light as to cause the starvation of the entire 

 colony after April 15. 

 Duluth, Minn., Aug. 27. 



THE BRITISH EXPERTS 



BY ONE OP THEM 



The certificates of proficiency in beekeep- 

 ing awarded by the British Beekeepers' 

 Association are more and more essential 

 as the county associations grow warm to 

 their work and the county councils decide 

 to appoint lecturers, demonstrators, and 

 inspectors. It may be of interest to our 

 American friends to hear of the three grades 

 of expert certified in this country, and a 

 little of the test which discovers them. 



At the lowest rung is the third-class 

 expert. He has to satisfy the examiner in 

 the first place as to his ability to manipulate 

 bees. Under the examiner's eye he opens a 

 hive, searches for and finds the queen, re- 

 places the frames in their proper order, and 

 makes the hive snug. Until quite lately the 

 examinee had also to drive the bees from a 

 skep or fixed-frame box hive, getting all 

 the bees out and securing the queen as she 

 ascends with the crowd. Undoubtedly this 

 will be a useful accomplishment for many 

 years to come, and it is, perhaps, a pity 

 that the test for it has been dropped. 



The manipulation over, the third-class 

 examinee has a talk of more than an hour's 

 duration with the examiner on the topics of 

 apparatus and their use, management, the 

 treatment of disease, and other questions of 

 practical bee culture. If he has proved 

 himself a manipulator, and comes out of 

 this talk with credit, he gets his third-class 

 certificate. 



A few months later he sits for the second- 

 class examination. This consists of two 

 papers — A, practical; B, scientific. All 

 candidates sit on the same day; but in 

 their own homes or places contiguous there- 

 to, a responsible person being appointed in 

 each case as " vigilator," to sit in the room 

 and see that the rules of the association are 

 observed. Two and a half hours' hard writ- 

 ing are needed for the answering of each 

 paper. The candidate will have read Cow- 

 an's " Honey-bee," the first volume (sci- 

 entific) of Cheshire and Cowan and Herrod 

 respectively on wax-rendering, preparation 

 of produce, and exhibiting. 



The papers of a recent seoond-elass ex- 



amination had five questions each. In the 

 practical, candidates had to deal with spring 

 work, wiring frames, the sources and qual- 

 ities of honey, all the details of rendering 

 and purifying wax, and were asked to give 

 a justification of the maxim, " keep your 

 stocks strong." In the scientific, the exam- 

 iner wanted a drawing and description of 

 each leg of a bee, a scientific placing of 

 Apis mellifica in the order of Annulates, an 

 enumeration and short description of the 

 trophi, something about the fertilization of 

 the queen and her eggs, and an illustrated 

 account of pollination of flowers by the bees. 

 For the first-class examination the candi- 

 date must have a still more exact knowledge 

 of Cowan's book, and must show " a satis- 

 factory acquaintance with the best litera- 

 ture on bees and beekeeping." He can 

 scarcely expect to pass without a good read- 

 ing, for example, of the "A B C and X Y Z," 

 and he must expect some questions on the 

 most up-to-date methods of American bee- 

 keeping. He may be asked, in the light of 

 this complete knowledge, to say something 

 about queen-rearing, the prominent differ- 

 ences between American and British meth- 

 ods for securing honey, the prevention of 

 excessive swarming, the pitfalls that beset 

 a novice, and how to avoid them; the duties 

 of a judge, and so on. In the scientific 

 pai^er he may have to draw the microscopic 

 details of an antenna, and allocate the 

 various discoveries of smell organs, and so 

 on to Swammerdam, Schiemenz, and the 

 others. He must know equally well about 

 the tongue, spermatheea, the nervous sys- 

 tem, the trachese, the ventricals, and the 

 rest, and be able to explain scientifically 

 hygienic details within the control of the 

 beekeeper. And perhaps he will be asked to 

 tell just what we owe to the discoveries of 

 Mehring, Langstroth, Hrusehka, Huber, 

 and others. In other words, his paper 

 knowledge must be somewhat extensive and 

 peculiar. 



One is not quite a first-class expert, even 

 when he has answered satisfactorily this 

 final paper. It has yet to be proved that 



