GLEANINGS 



IN 



BEE CULTUI\E. 



Devoted to Bees and Honey, and Home interests. 



Vol. IX. 



OCT. 1, 1881. 



No. 10. 



A. I. ROOT, 



Publisher and Proprietor, \ 

 IVIediiia, O. 



Published Monthly. 



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Established in 1873A'l7^,7ii.n^^L'e^^'''''''^°''''^'''' 



NOT 



NOTES FROM THE BANNER APIARY. 



No. 2^. 



A CHEAP OBSERVATORY HIVE. 



fDO not know whether jou would call it an ob- 

 servatory hive or a house apiary on a small 

 ' scale; but this is how it came about. One hot 

 day last August, two nice queens hatched out in the 

 lamp nursery, and there were no nuclei upon which 

 Ihe pin in the registeiing card pointed to "missing;" 

 neither were there any more empty hives in which to 

 start nuclei, and, as I disliked to kill the queens, I 

 stood for a moment wondering what I khmihl do with 

 them, when my eyes alighted upon a light shipping- 

 box in which friend Nellis had sent me a full colony 

 containing an imported queen. Whj- not fix up that 

 box for a hive? thought I; yes, and fasten it up in 

 one corner of the shop, and have a house apiary, 

 was the next thought. In just half an hour the bees 

 were flying from two holes in the sides of the shop. 

 These two holes wore the entrances to the two nu- 

 clei that occupied the shipping-box. A piece six 

 inches square was cut out from one side of the box; 

 this piece was then hung for a door by means of 

 leather hinges, and it was kept closed by means of a 

 little latch made from a pin. The inside of the open- 

 ing was covered with a piece of glass, and, by watch- 

 ing here a few minutes, I saw that one of the young 

 queens had been accepted, and was walking about 

 quite at her ease. I presume that some of you can 

 imagine the pleasure that I have experienced in 

 "fishing " nice yellow queens out of this impromptu 

 hive. How I do love to fix up nuclei in some such 



out-of-the-way place, in hives that cost almost next 

 to nothing, and then once in about ten days find 

 them occupied by nice laying queens. 



EXPERIMENTS IN WINTERING. 



I am now making some experiments with a view 

 to help solve the wintering problem. Of course, the 

 few experiments that I can make will not amount 

 to a great deal; but if one hundred bee-keepers 

 would make the same experiments for several 

 years in succession, they would certainly prove 

 sometlting. The statistical table so carefully pre- 

 pared by friend Newman, for which he certainly de- 

 serves a vote of thanks, shows that the care we give 

 our bees in preparing them for winter is not entire- 

 ly wasted— we have at least made some progress; 

 but until the percentage of losses in wintering is 

 considerably less than it has been for the past few 

 years, our beloved occupation will not take a place 

 in the front rank of agricultural pursuits. I hope 

 to live to see honey plenty and cheap (because of 

 no loss in wintering bees;) to see it used upon every 

 table, just as much as butter now is, and if I lose a 

 colony during the winter, I wish to be able to give 

 the reason with at least as much certainty as a ve- 

 terinary surgeon can tell what caused the death of a 

 horse or cow. I admire friend Heddon's course; he 

 does not know what is the trouble, and candidly 

 says so; but he is going to "cut and try" until he 

 finds out what it is. I say, let others do likewise; 

 let us all put our shoulders to the wheel, and never 

 stop until this one great difficulty is surmounted. 

 Until we can winter our bees with uniform success, 

 winter after winter, wo are unworthy the name of 

 bee-keepers. We can control the number of bees 

 that there arc to be in a colony, and, by our being 



