December, 1921 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



765 



into 10-frame hives. Even these didn 't 

 quite satisfy him. So when he heard Mr. 

 Dadant on big hives, at the Tennessee Con- 

 vention two or three years ago, he was 

 greatly impressed. The reasoning, the con- 

 clusions, and the experience — the experience 

 especially — struck this busy progressive 

 farmer-beekeeper forcibly. "I went home 

 from that convention," he says, "a big-hive 

 man. And I dug up and read every thing I 

 could find on the subject." 



The next summer he got a few square 

 Jumbo hives from The A. I. Root Company, 

 and he liked them better than anything yet 

 tried. A trip to Hamilton, 111., that fall, 

 with a visit to the Dadant apiaries, com- 

 pleted his conversion. Since then he has 

 kept on changing till now 70 colonies are in 

 the big hives. "I hope to have all the bal- 

 ance transferred by another fall," he says. 

 ' ' There is no question in my mind but that 

 these big hives very much reduce labor. Lots 

 of room, 1^- 

 i n c h spacing, 

 good worker 

 combs, young 

 queens, and 

 good super 

 room will re- 

 duce swarming 

 and labor — no 

 sort of doubt 

 about that." 



Being a far- 

 mer, with other 

 work crowding 

 him just when 

 the bees do, the 

 reduction of la- 

 bor is of vital 

 importance. He 

 has his honey- 

 house at the home yard and does all his 

 extracting there, with an 8-frame power- 

 driven extractor. It is interesting that he 

 uses only a one-size container, the 5-pouurt 

 bucket. 



University Professor as Beekeeper. 



The head of the Department of Philoso- 

 phy of Vanderbilt University, Nashville, 

 Tenn., is Dr. Herbert C. Sanborn. When 

 Dr. Sanborn, then in Winchester, Mass., was 

 a mere boy of fifteen, surely knowing little 

 of philosophy and with only vague far- 

 away dreams of future professorships, he 

 somehow acquired a box hive of bees. Two 

 years later he got a copy of ABC and 

 X Y Z of Bee Culture, an experience which 

 is always, to beginners, like the opening of 

 their eyes to ])uppies! Promptly he pro- 

 cured a proper kind of hive, transferred his 

 bees, sent to The A. I. Root Company for a 

 new queen and became what a boy would 

 call "a beekeeper right." Thruout his 

 high school years he kept 8 or 9 colonies. 

 And then he left his bees with his father 

 while he went away to college- — taking his 

 Ph.B. at Boston University and his A.M. at 

 Tufts College — and then, following the trail 



of the scholarly youth of that day, went 

 over to Germany: to Heidelberg (how the 

 very name conjures, almost equally, the fa- 

 mous castle, the centuries-old University, 

 solemn learning, drinking songs, and 

 duels!); to Berlin, the center of learning 

 for thousands of students every year; to 

 Munich with its old University and its mil- 

 lion-volume library and its once-loved art 

 galleries — ah, the once of Germany and the 

 now, in the hearts of aspiring men! It 

 was at Munich that he took his Doctor's de- 

 gree, riKifjua cum lande. 



In all his little trips thruout those years, 

 he was constantly looking up German bee- 

 keepers, and when he went over into Italy 

 he hunted out Italian beekeepers. So the 

 flame was kept alive. And at last he came 

 back home and went to teaching, first mod- 

 ern languages and later philosophy. It was 

 in Chestertown, Md., that some beekeeper 

 told him about a swarm of bees that had 



Dr. 



Herbert Sanborn, head of the Department of Philosophy, Vanderbilt University, 

 gets his recreation by working among his bees. 



settled near his home. Dr. Sanborn cap- 

 tured it, and again he was with bees, the 

 sideline delight of his boyhood. Soon he 

 had a dozen colonies, and in the fall of 1911, 

 when he accepted a professorship at Vander- 

 bilt, he put them in a freight car and ship- 

 ped them to Nashville. i 



The next year, 1912, he imported some 

 queens from Anthony Biagny of Bellinzona, 

 Italy — copper-colored queens from the Ital- 

 ion lakes. And the next year, 1913, one of 

 these queens produced 350 pounds of comb 

 honey. To be sure, 1913 was the big year. 

 Yet at that, 350 pounds was a record-breaker 

 for middle Tennessee. And the next year, 

 1914, when the season registered a com- 

 plete failure, a daughter of this queen pro- 

 duced 100 pounds. All his recent efforts to 

 reach Anthony Biagny have proved unavail- 

 ing. 



"It is far more interesting than golf," 

 he declares, "and after spending the after- 

 noon here with my bees — and my dogs and 

 vegetables and roses — I go back to school 

 in the morning refreshed in mind and body, 

 ready and eager for work," 



