46 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



N 



c 



lUr 



ORTH Car- 

 olina has 

 Mr. Geo. 

 H. R^a as bee- 

 keeping special- 

 ist, and now 

 Tennessee has 

 Ml-. C. E. Bar- 

 tholomew, for- 

 merly connected with the state experiment 

 work of Iowa. Mr. Bartholomew's ap- 

 pointment is a co-operative arrangement 

 between the United States Department of 

 AgTiculture, the State t)epartment of Agri- 

 culture, and the University of Tennessee. 

 His headquarters are at Knoxville, and he 

 has already started on his work of education. 

 He has been up in the mountain districts of 

 Sevier and Sullivan counties in East Ten- 

 nessee, looking over the situation, which he 

 reports as needing to be looked over. It 

 seems that the farmer beekeepers all over 

 the state have been growing constantly 

 fewer and fewer, and the total number of 

 colonies in Tennessee is reported to have 

 dwindled from 225,000 in 1900 to about half 

 that many at the present time. 



In our first interview Mr. Bartholomew 

 surprised me with the statement that from 

 such observations as he had made so far, 

 he had decided that there weren't so many 

 box-beekeepers in this state after all. I 

 expressed my loyal delight, whereupon Mr. 

 Bartholomew smiled and explained. " You 

 see," he said, " most of the bees in the 

 box hives have died out." So it seeiiis his 

 first work in the remote sections will be 

 to induce the ex-beekeepers to get rid of 

 the empty old boxes and " gums," and 

 then to stock up with real bees in real 

 hives. 



At Nashville last week. Mr. BartholomeAV 

 addressed the Hominnakers' Department 

 of the Farmers' Institute, giving interest- 

 ing information regarding the really great 

 possibilities of beekeeping in Tennessee. 

 This was followed with an address at Hunt- 

 ington, and on Saturday, Dec. 16, he will 

 speak at Franklin before a gathering of 

 farmers and beekeepers. 



It is going to mean something for Ten- 

 nessee to have Mr. Bartholomew here, and 

 we are going to help it mean the most 

 possible. We want to see the mountain 

 beekeepers and those in remote districts 

 enlightened, and we know the progressive 

 beekeepers will keep constantly advancing, 

 so as to be always in the fore front of 

 modern apiculture. So we shall all be in- 

 terested and open-minded, even tho Mr. 

 Bartholomew does start right off, the first 

 thing, on the subject of winter packing 



THE DIXIE BEE 



1 



Grace Alien 



W"^^^^^^^^ 



January, 1917 



for that's what 

 he's doing! At 

 least, it is one 

 of the things he 

 is doing. 



As soon as he 

 got here, he went 

 to studying 

 weather reports, 

 and he tells me that we have had as great 

 daily variation as 45 degrees, and that dur- 

 ing the winter months, as often as once 

 every week comes a day with a variation of 

 25 degrees. Wherefore, reasons Mr. Bar- 

 tholomew, there is no state where winter 

 packing is more needed than in Tennessee ! 

 Well, it shall be our pride that we are open 

 to conviction and education. We have been 

 honest in thinking we didn't need special 

 winter protection ; some of us because we 

 had been successful for thirty or forty years 

 without packing; some of us because we 

 had tried it and decided it didn't pay; and 

 most of us because we had infinite faith in 

 these others. 



Knowing that Mr. E. G. Carr had se- 

 riously advocated winter cases for North 

 Carolina, I wrote Mr. Bruce Anderson, of 

 Forsyth County, asking about the results 

 of winter packing there. He writes that 

 very few colonies in his county were so 

 packed last fall, and that equally strong 

 colonies without packing stored as much 

 surplus as those packed, but that last win- 

 ter was very mild, and anyway "one season's 

 experience is not sufficient to draw con- 

 clusions from." And that is true. So all 

 the keepers of Dixie bees a'-e going to be 

 open-minded toward 'this winter-packing 

 problem, consider it from all sides, and 

 give it a fair trial, for we assuredly are 

 not going to stand in our own light. 



Mr. Bartholomew is an intelligent, u])- 

 to-date man, well informed and of practical 

 experience. He seems in earnest about 

 this work in Tennessee and evidently in- 

 tends to give it his best efforts. He es- 

 pecially urges strong, active, local organ- 

 izations, with frequent meetings and dem- 

 onstrations. Surely, as Dr. Phillips says, 

 work and co-operation Avill bring results. 



Mr. Doolittle's figures on consumption 

 of winter stores are interesting, and al- 

 most startling. We whose bees are in a 

 mild climate, without packing, seem eom- 

 jielled to face the fact that they do con- 

 sume a greater quantity of honey during 

 the winter months than do those in the 

 North where they are confined so much 

 more steadily to the hive, particularly, 

 of course, in the case of cellar-wintering. 



