956 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



Sept. 15 



hauled up to the height of about 10 feet. It 

 may take several hours for the bees to find 

 it; but when they do they will begin in ear- 

 nest. The bees will form in bunches at the 

 perforations, and drop down; but instead of 

 dropping with a thud or a jar to the ground 

 or in the grass, sustaining more or less of a 

 shock, and wearing out their wings in the 

 scramble to take wing in the grass, they 

 catch wing before they actually strike the 

 ground, and fly up again. They no more 

 than get a little sip of syrup than down 

 they go again, catch wing, fly up, take a 

 sip and down again, and so on. The under 

 side of the tin is so smooth that there is 

 nothing for the bees to cling to, and they 

 can not do very much scrambling. But just 

 the minute two or three get to tugging at 

 the same hole, down they go. The result 

 is, we have produced almost all the condi- 

 tions of an artificial honey-flow. It takes 

 the bees so long to get a load of syrup that 

 they fly back and forth to the hives quietly, 

 and without excitement. Two 60-1 b. cans 

 of dilute syrup will keep a yard of some 300 

 colonies during an absolute dearth of honey 

 quiet for a couple of days so that the hives 

 can be opened indiscriminately, and combs 

 exposed without any robbing. It begins to 

 develop now that the bees that do most of 

 the robbing represent but a very small por- 

 tion of the whole yard. It is these that we 

 keep busy by outdoor feeding. As they can 

 not do any scrambling to any extent there is 

 not the same wear and tear that we experi- 

 enced in our early experiments. We fed up 

 for winter all of our 300 colonies at the 

 home yard by this outdoor feeding. What 

 is more, this syrup is ripened in nature's 

 way, and therefore must make an ideal win- 

 ter food. 



I am becoming more and more convinced 

 that there is more to this outdoor feeding 

 than we formerly supposed. Very often 

 extracting has to be deferred until after the 

 honey-flow, or during an absolute dearth of 

 honey. It is then that robbing will go on at 

 a furious rate; for it is simply impossible, in 

 opening the hives, shaking and brushing the 

 combs, to prevent robbers ^rom getting a sip 

 of honey now and then— just enough to put 

 the whole apiary in an uproar. Although I 

 have not tried it, I feel confident that this 

 robbing nuisance can be entirely overcome. 

 Take ordinary cheap honey, and dilute it 

 considerably with water. Put it into two 

 square tin cans prepared in the way I have 

 described, two days before extracting is to 

 be done. I recommend in this case the use 

 of honey rather than syrup, so if some of 

 the fed product goes into the combs that are 

 extracted it will do no harm, because it will 

 be honey just the same. In the two days 

 intervening the bees will have found the 

 feeders and will get nicely started. Proba- 

 bly the two cans of feed will last them for 

 the two days. Two cans more, at least, 

 will enable the apiarist to extract all of his 

 honey; for the would-be robbers have be- 

 come accustomed to the feeder; and if some 

 few bees should steal a little honey from 



the combs it will not cause a furore, because 

 other bees will naturally suppose it comes 

 from the feeders. The net result of this is, 

 that 100 or 150 lbs. of honey borrowed from 

 the bees enables one to take from them sev- 

 eral tons of extracted honey in a dearth. 



A few days ago at one of our outyards the 

 the boys attempted to do a little in-hive 

 feeding. It was not long before the apiary 

 was in an uproar, and one of the men phon- 

 ed up to our office to know what he should 

 do. I telephoned back to restrict the en- 

 trances of all the hives with green grass, 

 and stop inside feeding or opening up any 

 more hives, and to prepare immediately two 

 square cans for outdoor feeding. This they 

 did, hanging the cans on the limbs of two 

 near-by trees on the outskirts of the yard. 

 It took the robbers a little time to learn 

 where the feed was. As soon as they dis- 

 covered it, robbing began to let up. The 

 next day one of the boys went back to finish 

 up his work with the colonies. He opened 

 up the hives indiscriminately, without any 

 trouble from the robbers. I am sure we 

 could have done extracting or any thing 

 else, because the combs were exposed just 

 as much as if extracting had been going on. 



A good many county fairs will be held now 

 within the next thirty days. Some bee- 

 yards will be located near some of these 

 fairgrounds, where watermelons will be cut 

 open, and molasses candy made. If two 

 outside feeders be hung up two days pre- 

 vious to fair time it will effectually stop any 

 robbing on the part of the bees around any 

 of the candy- stands. We demonstrated this 

 conclusively a year ago, and we now feel 

 that we are master of the situation. 



But there may be some canning of fruit; 

 and if your bees are a nuisance, start an 

 outdoor feeder and keep it going until the 

 canning season is over. Perhaps the owner 

 of a cider-mill lodges a complaint. As he 

 will probably run his mill for thirty or nine- 

 ty days it will not be practicable to run out- 

 door feeding for that length of time, unless 

 the whole apiary needs a general feed. 



The best thing to do in that case is to get 

 mosquito-netting and screen the mill. If, 

 on the other hand, the yard is short of stores, 

 and will require the feeding of several bar- 

 rels of sugar, and if there are no other bees 

 in the vicinity, outdoor feeding can be prac- 

 ticed to great advantage. 



So far I have not said any thing about the 

 abuse of this method of stopping robbing by 

 giving the bees food. One of the abuses is 

 letting the bees get at the syrup so that 

 they can take 50 or 100 lbs. within an hour, 

 wearing their lives out prematurely. The 

 grooved-board plan makes this possible; 

 while the square can, with holes punched in 

 it and elevated ten feet above ground, re- 

 duces the wear and tear to a minimum, or 

 not much more than a natural honey-flow. 



Another abuse would be feeding your 

 neighbors' bees or stray bees in bee-trees. 

 Obviously the only thing to do is to feed in 

 the hives, unless you can arrange with your 

 neighbor to pay his pro rata of expense. 



