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GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



September, 1917 



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T WOULD be 



a great thing 

 if every one 

 could be induced 

 to use honey in 

 place of sugar 

 in hot drinks. 

 Allow that only 

 half the popula- 

 tion uses hot drinks, and that each one uses 

 only one ounce of honey daily for sweeten- 

 ing, it would take more than three million 

 pounds of honey to fill the demand. The 

 great thing in that is not the amount of 

 honey used, but the amount of increased 

 health and vigor of the people. You, my 

 reader, probably cannot do a great deal 

 toward securing a national custom of that 

 kind, but you can follow the custom in your 

 own case, and the benefit to you will be just 

 the same as if the whole nation were at it. 



"With extracted honey bringing more 

 per pound by the carload than comb by the 

 single case, we see little encouragement for 

 the comb-honey man. Better run every- 

 thing you can to extracted. Probably it 

 will pay you to extract the bulk of your 

 section honey also, saving the combs for 

 next season. The editor has a hundred 

 cases or so that he proposes to treat in just 

 that way. The honey, wax, and probable 

 increased cost of sections and starters next 

 season will far overbalance the labor, at 

 l^resent prices. Looks wicked, but will 

 pay." — Editor Bixby in The Western 

 Honey Bee. 



I HAVE just finished reading "Happy: 

 the Life of a Bee ;" and after reading again 

 the notice of the book, page 568, July 

 Gleanings, feel moved to say to the writer 

 of that notice. "Don't you think that the 

 beautiful manner in which the book is writ- 

 ten has beguiled you into being a bit too 

 charitable when you characterize as 'poetic 

 licenses' statements that are decidedly not 

 'scientifically true as to facts'? To make a 

 book interesting is it only necessary to fill 

 it with errors'? Take this: According to 

 the book, before the old queen issues with a 

 prime swarm her successor leaves her cell 

 and is fertilized. Do you really think 'the 

 interest is not lessened but rather increased 

 by the poetic licenses' of that sort? If so, 

 what a chance for adding interest the author 

 missed when he didn't say that the drones 

 lay all the eggs" ! 



G. M. DooLiTTLE, you say, p. 604, "Now, 

 the white capping of combs takes much 

 more wax than that transparent capping the 

 dark Italians use, where the combs in sec- 

 tions look so watery and uninviting." T 

 wonder whether nice measurement would 



STRAY STRAWS 



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Dr. C. C. MiUer 



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really show any 

 difference in the 

 thickness of cap- 

 pings. At any 

 rate it has gen- 

 erally been un- 

 derstood that 

 white capping 

 was because a 

 film of air was left between the honey 

 and the capping, while in watery cap- 

 ping the honey was filled up against the 

 capi^ing. You know that the whitest cap- 

 ping becomes watery if kept in a place 

 where the honey absorbs moisture, and I 

 suppose that's because honey takes the place 

 of the film of air. 



Paralysis. E. G. LeStourgeon, in TJie 

 Beekeepers' Item, defends with vigor his 

 theory that paralysis is caused by soured 

 nectar. He says: "Only nurse bees seem to 

 contract the disease We have repeat- 

 edly cured the disease in widely distant 

 places by removing the bad stores or by 

 providing food that was wholesome — and 

 we have been able to produce typical cases 

 by feeding fermented syrup at a time when 

 the nurse bees were obliged to use these 

 unfit stores for the preparation of food for 

 the larvae." Mr. LeStourgeon seems a can- 

 did sort of man, and the cure is so easy — 

 just give abundance of wholesome stores — 

 that it is surely worth trying. 



"Will bees start queen-cells above an ex- 

 cluder with or without supers between?" is 

 a question, p. 632, and Miss Fowls refrains 

 from replying, because "so much afraid of 

 Dr. Miller." I may be dangerous to some 

 folk. Miss Fowls, but not to you. I like 

 you. If I had been asked that question a 

 year ago, I should have replied that rarely 

 would cells be started over an excluder with 

 a laying queen below. But this year I've 

 used the Demaree plan with nearly all colo- 

 nies, and in about every case cells galore 

 have been built above. All but one brood 

 was raised to the third story, with no brood 

 in the second. If the brood is in the second 

 story, I think cells will not generally be 

 started. It makes little or no difference 

 whether cells are in the first story. 



E. S. Miller says, " If you have any 

 European foul brood around, frequent ex- 

 amination is important. It should not be 

 permitted to get beyond a few cells. If a 

 hive is found with, say, half a dozen bad 

 cells, treat it at once in this way : Remove 

 the queen and mark the hive. In about ten 

 days use the hive-body, bees and all, as a 

 super on some strong colony with queen- 

 excluder and a sheet of newspaper between. 

 See that there are no queen-cells. I am 



