Pebrtjary, 1921. 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



79 



he scoops up bees with his bare hands, puts 

 tliem in his hat, and then wears the hat. 

 With bees in his hands and in his "bonnet" 

 he will reel off before the astonished crowd 

 an interestino; storv about bees and how one 



Mr. Sams drumming on the hive to drive the bees 

 up against the top board so he tan remove them 

 and then cut out the combs. Courthouse officials of 

 Wilmington, with an inborn sense of safety and a 

 snap, looking out from withi. 



of his key men, Mr. Jones, we will say, is 

 keeping bees on the new plan over at cross- 

 roads so and so. To the fruit men he ex- 

 plains the value of bees as pollinators. This 

 kind of talks and demonstrations is cer- 

 tainly making a hit all over the State of 

 South Carolina. It would be diiBcult to esti- 



Nature's Spacing of Combs. 



The illustration at the top of this col- 

 umn shows how irregularly bees space their 

 combs when they work as they used to do 

 thousands of years before man tried to regu- 



The. "inards" of a box hive after the bees have been 



drummed out. Notice how irregularly the bees have 



spaced the combs. 



late the distances. In view of recent discus- 

 sions on the proper spacing of combs for 

 brood-nests I was interested to measure up 

 the distances between the combs. I made 

 hundreds of measurements while looking 

 over box hives in the South, and' I find that 

 the average spacing for worker brood seems 



Mr. Saras, bee extension agent for Uncle Sam and 

 North Carolina, cutting the combs of a box hive 

 loose with a hand saw, on the courthouse grounds 

 at Wilmington, with a crowd watching. (Court- 

 house officials still inside.) 



mate the value in dollars and cents. If Mr. 

 Sams keeps up this pace. South Carolina as 

 a bee State will come forward by leaps and 

 bounds. His is the kind of work that counts, 

 because the eye can see the methods and 

 the results. The proof of the pudding is in 

 the eating. 



I think I am in position to know some- 

 thing of Mr. Sams' work, because it was 

 my privilege to follow him last spring over 

 the State. I took snapshots of him in action, 

 some of which are given herewith. 



In our next issue I propose to show his 

 methods, particularly those illustrating his 

 plans for transferring. If there is any man 

 in this whole country who knows this art, 

 it is Mr. Sams. 



Modern hives into which bees in "gums" had been 

 transferred by Mr. Sams and his helpers. 



to be slightly under 1% inches. The store 

 combs run all the way from 1^2 and 1% to 

 2 inches, or an average of slightly over I14 

 inches. In a large number of cases it was 

 noticeable that the combs were spaced wider 

 apart at the top of the box or gum, and 

 closer together toward the centers and the 

 bottom. The illustration shows a slight ten- 

 dency that way; but it is not so pronounced 

 as a number of others that I saw. For 

 brood-rearing it is apparent to me that na- 

 ture indicates 1% inches; for drone comb 

 and store comb, 11/2, altho there are wide 

 variations, but the average runs as indi- 

 cated. Some 30 years ago I had the honor 

 of setting the spacing for Hoffman frames 

 at 1%. In view of what I saw in the South- 

 land, perhaps, I was not far out of the way. 



