1906 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



75 



DISPOSING OF THE CROP. 



If you make a crop, what are you going to 

 do with it ? With many bee-keepers it is an 

 easy matter to produce a crop of fine honey; 

 but then their abihty to handle it to advan- 

 tage ceases. This should not be. The pro- 

 ducer should know and understand how to 

 make the most out of his crop. If he does 

 not he should educate himself up to it. 

 With some this ability comes naturally; but 

 others must learn it. Education is neces- 

 sary in other lines, and also applies in api- 

 culture. 



STORAGE- CRATES FOR COMB HONEY AND 

 SECTIONS. 



Doctor Miller does not seem to have under- 

 stood my description of the way my storage- 

 crates for comb honey are made, since he 

 says that he does not understand that they 

 are any more open than supers. If he will 

 read over again my description on page 1121 

 of the way they are made, and will then 

 make one up according to directions, he will 

 see that they are very much more open and 

 ventilated than any super, and that it would 

 be practically impossible to pile them up in 

 any such way that there would not be a free 

 circulation of air through them. I made a 

 slight mistake, though, in my description 

 when I said that four pieces of lath make 

 the bottom. It takes five pieces, supporting 

 four rows of sections. These should not be 

 nailed on so that the spaces between are ex- 

 actly regular, but so that the inside ones are 

 divided evenly between the rows of sections. 

 To make a crate for li sections, using J lum- 

 ber for the sides, these pieces of lath should 

 be 13i long. The sides on which they are 

 nailed should be about 17| long (no shorter, 

 though a little longer would do no harm) 

 and at least 4x\ wide, making the inside 

 depth of the crate a little more than the 

 height of the sections. 



Unless your lumber is perfectly seasoned, 

 cut your boards ^ wider. When honey is 

 placed is this crate, the air always has free 

 access to the bottom of the sections, even 

 if the top is tightly covered, and there is 

 more or less circulation of air through the 

 ends. 



Now, I did not say that Dr. Miller piled 

 his supers of honey up closely together, but 

 that almost all bee-keepers did so. I have 

 been in the honey-houses of a great many 

 bee-keepers, and I believe I have never yet 

 seen one in which there was what I consid- 

 ered adequate provision for ventilating and 



ripening the honey, and it was but very 

 rarely that any attempt whatever was made 

 in that direction. 



Very often the honey is put into shipping- 

 cases as fast as it is taken from the hives. 

 This I consider very detrimental to the qual- 

 ity of the honey. We have heard a great 

 deal about the folly and shortsightedness of 

 those who put unripe extracted honey on the 

 market, but I think it is high time that we 

 paid more attention to the proper ripening 

 of comb honey. 



Now a little more in regard to the other 

 uses of these storage- crates, since some do 

 not seem to understand the advantage of 

 having another set of receptacles than the 

 supers or shipping-cases. As the sections 

 are folded, they are set into the crates up- 

 side down. When thoroughly dry they are 

 ready to have the foundation put in, when 

 you will find that the sections are right side 

 up for this purpose. After the foundation 

 is in, the sections are set back into the 

 crates, right side up this time. You may 

 think that time could be saved by putting 

 them directly into the supers, but really 

 time is saved by doing one thing at a time. 

 Besides, while I usually have all the work 

 up to this point done by cheap help, I prefer, 

 when possible, to do the work of putting the 

 sections into the supers myself, in order to 

 give each one a rigorous though quick inspec- 

 tion before it goes to the bees. I find I have 

 not nearly as many imperfect sections when 

 I attend to this myself. 



When the supers are removed from the 

 hive they are emptied as soon as possible, 

 though in the rush of the honey season it 

 may not be for some days. The object of 

 this is to remove any unfinished sections 

 and get them back on the hives as soon as possi- 

 ble. It is but seldom that I leave a super 

 on the hive until every section is entirely 

 finished. Generally there are some to go 

 back to the bees. While getting these out 

 it takes but a little more time to empty the 

 super, putting the finished sections into the 

 storage-crates, there to remain until I am 

 ready to scrape the sections. This releases 

 the supers for further use, if they are need- 

 ed; and if they are, they are very quickly 

 filled from the sections ready for use, pack- 

 ed away in storage-crates. This reduces 

 greatly the amount of supers required to 

 handle the crop, and correspondingly the 

 amount of capital invested in them, since a 

 storage-crate costs only a fraction of the 

 price of a good super. When the sections 

 are stored away in these crates they are in 

 the best possible shape for ripening the hon- 

 ey, owing to the abundance of ventilation 

 ensured. 



Usually I prefer to make separate jobs of 

 scraping, sorting, and casing, the honey be- 

 ing put back into the storage-crates after 

 each operation except the final one of casing, 

 which is put off as long as possible. 



Some might object to the extra handling 

 required by this; but the work can be done 

 better and generally faster by doing one 

 thing at a time. One learns to work rapid- 



