OC'TOBKR 1920 



G L E A N I X G S IN B K K C U L T U K K 



609 



.NOE sevoiiil 



w 



LJ 



\^ years ago 

 I read of 

 some beekeeper 

 editor who ooii- 

 I'essod a fond- 

 ness for artii'les 

 (111 heelore tliat 

 were written on 

 si- raj IS of paper 



suieari'tl with propolis, because, forsooth, 

 tliev were so evideutly the product of a 

 fjeiuiine beekeeper. I couhi see that favored 

 type of writer in my mind's eye — a niie 

 obi man, a bit sticky as to fingers, sittinjj 

 oil a hive, with a pad of paper and a 

 stubby pencil. Being a typewriter devotee 

 myself, and not a nice old man, the closest 

 I usually approach to my oWn treasured 

 l>icture of a correct bee writer is to sit 

 out among the bees wnth my little machine 

 before me. So here I sit today. But it is 

 nlmost impossible to write. There is some- 

 thing about the way the bees are humming 

 that takes all my proper sideline thoughts 

 away and weaves th'&in into dreams. And 

 shall there be dreams in a department on 

 "Beekeeping as a Sideline"? To be sure, 

 beekeeping would not be my sideline, nor 

 one I would care often to write about, if it 

 shut the door on dreams. But tho there 



Beekeeping as a Side Line 



LJ 



Grace Allen 



3 rainy month it 

 was. Only eight 

 clear days they 

 had between 

 July a n d Sep- 



tember, says our 

 ]iractical, sign- 

 reading, record- 

 keeping weath- 

 erman; and only 

 two so far tiiis month, today being Septem- 

 ber eighth. 



During the first part of that rainy spell 

 of late summer, I sighed often thinking 

 how the bees were being kept from the 

 fields; and how they must be consuming 

 all the nice clover honey we had left them 

 (one shallow super per hive). Yet little 

 by little the hives grew heavier. They had 

 started gathering honeydew in July, and 

 neither the usual sun nor the unusual. rain 

 of August stopped them. In it came, mixed 

 of course with heartsease and a little swee*t 

 clover and other nectars, and finally they 

 so surely had all they needed that we took 

 from a score or more hives the supers of 

 white clover honey we had left. But alas, 

 a considerable part of the light honey had 

 been eaten out and replaced with the honey- 

 dew and late honeys. 



Local beekeepers have seldom had so 

 have been many things in this particular much honeydew. Everyone is frankly 



ilepartment in months gone by, this really troubled over the right thing to do with it. 

 is, you see, a journal about bee culture, and Nobody really wants to eat it or sell it or 



the Editor questions the propriety of ad- 

 mitting other things. Probably he's right, 

 especially when it comes to mere dreams of 

 beauty and wide spaces and flaming life 

 and days to come and God. But I'm afraid 

 I '11 have to begin writing indoors where 

 thoughts are more easily controlled, fore- 

 going the propolis stains on my paper and 

 the humming of bees in my ears, to get 

 away from the distracting bigness and 

 beauty of this lovely world. But all true 

 sideline beekeepers will agree that this 

 gentle singing silence, laying its blessings 

 on our souls, is one of the things that keeps 

 us with our bees. It is not so much the 

 money, nor to any great extent the honey, 

 that brings us away from our other work 

 to where the bees strike their shining trail 

 across the sun. A great sense of some- 

 thing big and fine and high and soul-nur- 

 turing clings about a country bee-yard, like 

 some unmeasured garment of the Unknown, 

 the hem of which we sometimes touch with 

 yearning or with rapture or with dream. 



It really isn't strange that these bees of 

 ours make us thus forget our chosen lines 

 of thought in the days of early September. 

 This noon the earth was dark and clouded, 

 and when the sun came thru and flooded 

 the hives, how the young bees did pour 

 out into the light! Before hive after hive 

 they swung and swayed and circled, filling 

 the air with the sound of young wings. 

 Just so fleetingly and hungrily they cliumed 



leave it for the bees to winter on. If 

 there were only a little, it could be saved 

 for spring feeding, but there 's too much 

 of it. A few beekeepers have boldly put 

 it on the market, heavy with honeydew; 

 and customers, expecting the same fine 

 honey they had bought earlier, have regis- 

 tered many complaints. One beekeeper 

 showed it to a baking concern, and they 

 offered him about half what he had received 

 in thousand-pound lots for his white honey. 



I'm afraid there weren't any bees on 

 ♦ hose combs with the queen-cells, Mr. 

 Pritchard, that we gave to the colonies 

 whose queens we had just killed. Thus 

 the cells were doubly * * unprotected. ' ' 

 Probably that explains our failure. But 

 I doubt if this can account for Mr. Has 

 singer's experience of 50 per cent of such 

 cells destroyed; for he speaks distinctly of 

 giving combs with adhering bees, when out- 

 lining his own system. 



"^'ou are right, too, about the misunder- 

 standing of the term "unprotected cell". 

 I have always thought of an unprotected 

 cell as just plain unprotected. Since "the 

 bee«8 which would naturally adhere to such 

 a comb are nearly if not quite as much 

 protection to a queen-cell as would be a 

 spiral cell-protector," perhaps we ought 

 not to call a cell thus protected an "un- 

 jirotected" cell. 



The year will finally come, earlier per- 



their playtimes all during August, such a haps than some .dare hooe. when box hives 



