AlClsT. 1!I-J() 



(. I. i; \ \ I \ (; S IN BEE CULTURE 



473 



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I I () (1 y r e- 



III t' in b (» r 

 Mr. Allan's keji 

 that failed to 

 transfer itself f 

 Well, Mr. Allen 

 says I must atld 

 that the queen 

 evidently went 



up once or twice to deposit eggs in the super 

 on top, but she never let herself get caught 

 there. lie slipped an excluder in once or 

 twice, only to find no eggs upon the next ex- 

 amination, showing that she was in the keg 

 below when the excluder was put in. Prob- 

 ably had he been able to do it often enough 

 during the season, slipping it in and out sev- 

 eral times, he might have caught her. But 

 anyway her workers stored some beautiful 

 honey in their new supers. 



We know a beekeeper who had a dis- 

 astrous experience this summer, in removing 

 honey by means of an escape with no inner 

 cover over the supers. He had never bought 

 from the supply houses any covers other 

 than the metal ones, but there are in the 

 yard a few other kinds that were acquired 

 when buying bees. Evidently some of them 

 are of faulty construction, altho this was 

 not discovered while the bees were in the 

 hives right up to the roof and so 

 able to protect the top. Fortunately 

 under most of these old covers were 

 laid folded sheets of newspaper or burlap 

 when putting escapes under, but one or two 

 supers of particularly pretty honey got 

 skipped. The bees being trapped down thru 

 the escape, these supers of nice sealed honey 

 were left with about three inches at each 

 end of the top open for robber bees. They 

 found them, too. When the yard was reached 

 about 10:30 the next morning, it looked as 

 tho a swarm were taking possession. Not 

 one ounce of honey was obtained from that 

 colony, but instead two supers of combs 

 were ba<lly damaged. 



This matter of putting on escapes and de- 

 ciding how much honey to take off becomes 

 more difficult and complicated when the bee- 

 keeper is caught with a lot of unsealed 

 honey on his hands. We were among those 

 so caught this year, having piled on every- 

 thing we possessed in the shape of supers 

 during our unusual white-clover bloom of 

 May, only to see it come to a swift and un- 

 expected end in mid-June. "I take every- 

 thing in the hive, sealed or not, and then 

 heat it all. No danger of fermentation 

 then," states one producer. "All I ask of 

 the bees is to bring in the nectar; I can't do 

 that myself," says another. "But I can 

 ripen it in tanks the way they do in Cali- 

 fornia. What do I care whether it's sealed 

 or not?" "I leave all unsealed stuff on the 

 liives — I'd far rather have it there than 

 mixed with my ripe sealed extracted," de- 

 clares another. "I don 't take any unless its 

 sealed or nearly so," insists another. Per- 

 sonally T lean strongly towards the sealed- 



Beekeeping as a Side Line 



LJ 



Grace Allen 



^JU 



w^^^^^^^^ 



s 



or-nearly-so sys- 

 tem, but when 

 there 's a great 

 (leal of unsealed 

 on hand, it 

 makes a differ- 

 e n c e. Locality 

 becomes a strong 

 factor in the 

 matter. For in 

 some places the bees will finish these un- 

 sealed supers during a later flow, finally 

 yielding them as surplus, even tho possibly 

 not so choice as the first crop. But in other 

 places, if left on the hives, there will still 

 be unsealed honey scattered thru too many 

 combs when cold weather arrives. 



I said the flow stopped in mid-June. So 

 -it did around this new country yard. At 

 home it lingered along for another ten days 

 or two weeks, while still further down on 

 the river road, a beekeeper assured us it 

 would continue for still another two weeks. 

 This difference seems to be the result of dif- 

 ferent soil conditions. The soil thruout this 

 country yard section is very shallow, with 

 a great deal of rock lying near the surface. 

 Ten days of hot dry weather and the white- 

 clover bloom had gone glimmering. Limited 

 quantities of sweet clover flourishing around 

 encourage me to believe that it may do par- 

 ticularly well here, which will compensate 

 in part for the too early cessation of white- 

 clover bloom. I wish we had tried our sam- 

 ple of the new annual white sweet clover 

 out here instead of at home where I suspect 

 the soil may be a bit acid. Mr. Allen sowed 

 it hurriedly one March morning, without 

 lime, and while by the end of June most of 

 it was less than a foot high with no sign of 

 bloom, a few plants were waist-high and in 

 full bloom. 



A certain young sideline friend of ours 

 had bought some bees in a box hive. In the 

 spring, acting under our advice, he tried let- 

 ting them transfer themselves. He put a 

 new hive with full sheets of foundation, 

 and one or two old combs we gave him, over 

 the old hive, closed the lower entrance, and 

 left them there. More and more discouraged, 

 he keiit reporting no queen above. ^Moreover, 

 he wanted to requeen them. So he sent off 

 for a queen, and when it arrived, I joined 

 him one day in mid-June to help him trans- 

 fer by the old sticky cut-out-andtie-in 

 method. Having been warned that they 

 would resent it, I armed myself with par- 

 ticularly bee-proof costume. "We opened the 

 super, scorned of the queen, and found some 

 beautiful honey, sealed white and solid to 

 the bottom-bar. Setting this super down 

 on a bottom-board, on the same stand, to 

 give the returning field bees a place to en- 

 ter during the operation, we carried the old 

 box to another side of the attractive little 

 back yard. There we pried it gently apart, 

 cut out the comb, tied the worth-while brood 

 into emjity frames, getting four such combs 

 of brood altogether. A little good honey, in 

 comb too tough and old to be e<lib]e, was put 



