c 



December, 1920 



THERE is not 

 much to be 

 said, eitlior 

 new or original, 

 about how good 

 a teacher 's expe- 

 rience is or high 

 a tuition s li o 

 charges; it Ims 

 all bee u said 



long ago and many times. But one feels en- 

 tirely justified in repeating the old remarks. 

 For Experience is a good teacher, and her 

 price does sometimes come pretty high. That 

 is the chief reason for reading and studying, 

 that we may profit by what others have al- 

 ready learned and paid for. But most of us 

 at one time or another are like the woman 

 beekeeper from whom I received a letter a 

 few days ago; we have to learn some things 

 by our very own experience. Perhaps some 

 beginners may benefit from this letter, and 

 learn from some one's else experience, so I 

 am going to copy part of it. 



"I noticed in your October department of 

 ' Beekeeping as a Sideline ' that your bees 

 had presented you with some honeydew honey 

 this season. I wonder what you did witli 

 it. I can 't help telling you about our ex- 

 perience. My brother helps me a lot, and we 

 have lots of fun learning things we prob- 

 ably ought to know. "We read, too, but some 

 way we always think we can put things over 

 and sometimes we do. But, oh dear, some- 

 times we don't! This time we did, but we 

 had a time doing it. 



"We had given our bees some half -depth 

 frames to get bulk comb honey from, but we 

 put them on too late and most of them didn 't 

 get finished, so we just left them on. Then 

 the bees filled them with honeydew and 

 capped it over. I believe they ate most of 

 the clover out, tho, first. We didn't know 

 what to do. We didn 't want to leave them 

 on thru the winter. It wasn't because of the 

 honeydew, tho. We knew the bees would have 

 to winter on that because they didn't have 

 anything else. But we didn't think such 

 little combs would do for them to cluster 

 on, and then, besides, we wanted those 

 frames empty so we could get them ready to 

 put on early next spring and get them filled 

 with good clover honey in new comb. So 

 we decided to cut out the honeydew honey 

 and feed it back to them in pans on the 

 hives. Does it sound easy? Well, it wasn't. 

 As soon as we started cutting the stuff' 

 out. and that was just what it was, hor- 

 rid, black, sooty stuff, awfully sickish tast- 

 ing, the bees must have smelled it and 

 scouted round till they found out how to 

 get in to what we use for a honey-house. I 

 don 't suppose that was hard for them to do, 

 because it isn't anywhere near bee-proof. 

 They poured into the room like rain thru a 

 leaky roof. I wish you could have seen us! 

 Honey all over and bees all around. It was 

 lilje a swarm around up. in the honey and 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



735 



Beekeeping as a Side Line 

 lUf 



Grace Alien 



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on u r sticky 

 hands and all 

 over the pans 

 and boxes we 

 were putting it 

 ill. Some of it 

 we just cut into 

 pieces and 

 jabbed the knife 

 thru the cells on 

 each side, and some of it we squeezed. Mv 

 brother did the squeezing, and you can 

 imagine his hands! Of course we both got 

 stung several times, picked up bees and 

 bumped against them and had a dreadful 

 time. We did have sense enough to wait 

 till late in the afternoon to put it in the 

 hives, but even then it got them awfully 

 excited. We had to contract entrances and 

 pile grass up in front of them and do all 

 sorts of things to try to stop the robbing. 

 The next day we looked in the hives to see 

 if they had cleaned it up. Tlie robbers fol- 

 lowed us around and jumped on every hive 

 we opened, but we kept on going anyway. 

 We had to, we had started something and 

 we had to finish it. In every hive the top 

 part was always cleaned up fine, just dry 

 comb left, but down underneath where they 

 couldn't get to it, and a lot of honey had 

 drained down to the bottom, it was a sight. 

 The bees were over it so thick we couldn't 

 get them out in any way. We stirred it up, 

 bees and all, to let them get to the bottom. 

 You can't think what a sickly, crawly mess 

 it was. A lot of bees got killed and we won- 

 dered how many queens were in it getting 

 killed too. I suppose we'll find that out next 

 spring. We had taken the honey-boards off 

 first. That was silly, too, wasn't it? 



' ' I remember once you said that folks that 

 love bees enjoy everything that happens, 

 even the things that come from their own 

 'apiarian sins.' If you hadn't written that, 

 I don't believe I'd have dared admit how I 

 laughed right thru this whole ' apiarian sin ' 

 of ours. But I can promise you that we won't 

 feed back any more honey by cutting it up or 

 squeezing it. " 



That was assuredly a disconcerting expe- 

 rience. It would have been better to extract 

 the honey and feed it back in friction-top 

 pails. As for the queens, I don't know 

 whether they would come up into that comb 

 honey or not. If brood-rearing was still 

 going on, quite surely not, having plentj^ of 

 room, as shown by the fact of needing feed- 

 ing. But after brood-rearing stops, they seem 

 to roam about the hives more. We had a 

 disconcerting experience of our own along 

 that line. 



« » « 



I always look thru the yard in late sum- 

 mer or fall to make sure of each colony's 

 having a queen. This fall I was a little late 

 and what was worse, aster had yielded prac- 

 tically nothing, everything was dry and 

 brood-rearing had completely stopped in 



