988 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Aug. 1 



that his journal shall give a report of the 

 meetings of that association, and the number 

 of members of that association is 50,000! 

 That makes us Americans feel pretty small. 

 Herr Neumann, v?ith our big country and 

 our little association of 2000 members. 



MoRLEY Pettit says in American Bee 

 Journal that the reason there are burr- 

 combs between my top-bars, and none be- 

 tween his, is that my top-bars are i thick 

 and his §. If that's true I wish mine were 

 all |. Does that same difference prevail in 

 all other cases? [Mr. Pettit may be right; 

 but my experience (as I now remember it) 

 has been rather the other way. The nearer 

 the comb comes to the top of the top-bar, 

 the more of these brace-cambs there will be. 

 I should be glad to get reports on this ques- 

 tion.— Ed.] 



Reform of our abominable spelling is a 

 thing that will not down. The papers say 

 that simplified spelling is likely to obtain in 

 the New York schools by adopting the spell- 

 ing of the 300 words listed by the simplified- 

 spelling board. But "shook" as a parti- 

 ciple or adjective is not one of them. It is 

 still spelled " s-h-a-k-e-n." [Now, doctor, 

 I tried for nearly two years (just to please 

 you) to get our correspondents to adopt the 

 grammatical equivalent for "shook;" but 

 they just wouldn't, and one fellow was mad, 

 yes, real mad about it because we changed 

 his copy.— Ed.] 



I don't know whether buckwheat honey 

 is more antiseptic than any other kind, as 

 W. W. Case believes, p. 950; but I think it 

 is a somewhat general belief. Why not de- 

 cide by analysis the amount of formic acid 

 in buckwheat as compared with other hon- 

 ey? [Buckwheat honey may be slightly 

 more antiseptic than other honey, but I 

 doubt it; but the point I desired to make 

 was that a heavy flow from any source will 

 always check and sometimes cure either 

 black or foul brood. As buckwheat is a very 

 strong jielder in New York, the honey would 

 not have to be any more antiseptic than or- 

 dinary clover or basswood to account for the 

 check or cure of the cases reported. — Ed.] 



J. L. Anderson's plan of cleaning up sec- 

 tions isn't so simple as yours, Mr. Editor, 

 p. 951, but it is a good deal safer. His sec- 

 tions will be all right, but yours will be torn 

 to pieces. Didn't you mean to add that the 

 entrance should be only large enough for one 

 or two bees at a time? [In looking up page 

 951 I see I did not make it clear in the first 

 part of the footnote that the sections I 

 would put in the hive remote from the bee- 

 yard were to be first extracted; but in the 

 next column, at the top of the page, you 

 will see that I referred to the bees cleaning 

 up the "wet sections." I do not think the 

 bees would mutilate or tear down combs 

 that have been uncapped and extracted. 

 For such I wouldn't reduce the size of the 

 entrance; but if not extracted I certainly 

 would reduce the entrance to a space that 

 would admit only one or two bees at a time. 

 There, do we agree now?— Ed. ] 



"Out of 119 counties in Kentucky, nearly 

 100 at the present time are under local op- 

 tion, and there is little doubt that a good 

 many more will adopt local option under the 

 County Unit Bill passed by the last legisla- 

 ture. " That's not tne jubilant note of a 

 Prohibition paper, but the doleful wail of a 

 leading liquor paper, Bonfort's Semi- Month- 

 ly Wine and Spirit Circular. Mind you, 

 too, that's in Kentucky. [Of course, you 

 do not mean that Kentucky in your last sen- 

 tence is any worse than any other State, but 

 that some other States have made greater 

 pretensions, and yet are away behind on the 

 temperance question. Another thing, Ken- 

 tucky has a governor who is enforcing law. 

 It is getting to be more the fashion now- 

 days to have governors who enforce law. 

 With more good laws and governors who do 

 things we shall soon drive out the rummies. 

 -Ed.] 



You SAY, Mr. Editor, page 947, that you 

 used the Jones nuclei back in 1882. Some 

 years before that I saw Adam Grimm use 

 them, and I don't know who used them be- 

 fore that. [It would not be at all surprising 

 if Adam Grimm were ahead of all of us in 

 the use of miniature nuclei ; for it is a fact 

 that this remarkable bee-keeper, who is said 

 to have started a bank off from the money 

 he made on his bees, was clear away and 

 ahead of the times in several things. In 

 speaking about the old Jones nuclei, one of 

 our men brought in a day or two ago one of 

 such boxes, made in 1878. It took five half 

 Langstroth frames, or, rather, two frames 

 made of such a size as would just fit inside 

 of a regular standard all wood Langstroth 

 frame, top-bar § inch thick. When filled, 

 these two half- sections filled were taken out 

 and slipped into another frame just large 

 enough to receive one. Five of these made 

 up the Jones nucleus hive. A year or so 

 later we got so far as to put a thin division 

 in the center of these boxes, taking two nu- 

 clei of two frames each in one box. The 

 general principle was practically the same 

 as our twin nuclei of to-day, except that the 

 latter divides the Langstroth frames up into 

 thirds rather than halves. —Ed.] 



By all means, if we can, Mr. Editor, 

 let's get to the bottom of that matter in 

 last Straw, p. 929. Mr. Wardell says that, 

 when a strange virgin gets into a hive, she 

 almost invariably displaces the old queen. I 

 know that the opposite is true here. It is 

 not likely that locality has any thing to do 

 with it. Is it character of bees, condition, 

 or what? At one time I tried on a pretty 

 large scale putting in very young virgins to 

 supersede the laying queens. They were 

 kindly treated while still young, but a day 

 or two later they would turn up missing. If 

 given to a colony about to supersede its 

 queen the result no doubt would be different. 

 Now I should like very much if you will tell 

 me how to succeed as Mr. Wardell does. 

 [In the foregoing, doctor, you have let out 

 a fact that explains why your experience 

 differs from ours. If you will refer back to 

 a part of this difcussion you will see that 



