1905 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



1011 



summer time, when the bees would other- 

 wise desert the sections. Mr. Burt esti- 

 mates, therefore, that the winter cases are 

 equally valuable both in summer and winter. 



"THE GOOD SEASONS WILL COME AGAIN." 



The following editorial in the Bee-keepers' 

 Review contains so much good sense that I 

 am glad to place it before our readers with 

 a hearty amen: 



I have a most sensible letter from a subscriber in one 

 of the Southern States. He writes rather discourage- 

 ingly in regard to his location, saying that there have 

 been repeated failures, year after year, and in two 

 years he has fed twenty barrels of sugar to keep the 

 bees alive. 



In former years he had harvested crops that were 

 phenomenal, and was able to rear queens continually 

 from March to October, with no feeding at all. Now 

 all this is changed. He says the question with him is, 

 shall he go somewhere else? Upon investigation he 

 says it has been found that nearly all localities have pe- 

 riods of failure, the same he is now experiencing. He 

 has about concluded that nothing may be gained by 

 changing. If the same kind of honey-producing plants 

 are present in large numbers, as those that furnished 

 the big crops of the past. I think I should stay by them. 

 Along in the nineties we had very poor honey crops 

 here in Michigan— so poor that I came as near being 

 discouraged as I ever did. I began to feel that, as the 

 country was being cleared up, the honey-plants were 

 disappearing, and that the good crops were things of 

 the past and not of the future. In this I was mistaken. 

 The last three years have furnished excellent harvests. 

 As reported recently in the Review, one bee-keeper 

 near here secured, last year, nearly 100 lbs. of comb 

 honey, per colony from 60 colonies, spring count. Tak- 

 ing the country as a whole, it appears as though the 

 crop for this year will be a light one, but Michigan is 

 furnishing a good crop. And so it goes That is, the 

 good seasons come and go ; and, unless the plants have 

 been destroyed that furnish the honey, unless the con- 

 ditions have been radically changed in some manner, I 

 think it doubtful if it is wise to change localities be- 

 cause of a few years of failure. 



ANOTHER COMB-HONEY CANARD RETRACT- 

 ED; THE DUTY OF BEE-KEEPERS. 



Some time ago there appeared in the Den- 

 ver Post, one of the leading dailies of the 

 West, the old statement about manufactured 

 comb honey. The local bee-keepers, I im- 

 agine, immediately wrote their protests. At 

 any rate, Mr. A. S. Parson, President of the 

 Arkansas Valley Honey-producers' Associa- 

 tion, took the matter up vigorously by let- 

 ter. Failing to get a satisfactory response 

 he wrote again, and received a very nice 

 letter from the managing editor, stating he 

 did not blame Mr. P. " for having feelings, 

 and a whole lot of them, and expressing 

 them pretty strongly." He further added 

 that, if Mr. Parson would write an article of 

 about 500 words, explaining the general 

 facts about honey, he would place it on the 

 query page. The result was a full correc- 

 tion, with a strong black heading, ' ' Comb 

 Honey Can Not be Manufactured," and a 

 double-column denial below. 



I suspect the thing that carried weight 

 was the fact that Mr. Parson was the pres- 

 ident of a honey -producers' association. His 

 protest carried with it the implied protests 

 of all the membership back of him. In nine 

 cases out of ten I believe local bee-keepers 

 can secure retractions if they will either go 

 in person or write, and politely request the 

 privilege of replying. 



The trouble is, the average bee-keeper 

 will send such items to the editor of a bee 

 paper, which is all right so far as it goes, 

 and stop there. He should not only do this, 

 but he should at the same time send in a 

 courteous denial to the editor, and then fol- 

 low it up with a personal interview if possi- 

 ble. This is a duty that the secretaries and 

 presidents of the various bee associations or 

 honey-producers' associations, if you choose, 

 should take up promptly, writing the protest 

 on the official stationery of the organization. 



The A. I. Root Co. always writes to all 

 these papers; but we are often ignored or 

 turned down, possibly because the managing 

 editor thinks we have an "ax to grind," or 

 that we are one of the alleged manufactur- 

 ers of comb honey, and are trying to cover 

 up our own misdeeds; but when he is ad- 

 dressed by an official of a bee-keepers' asso- 

 ciation he sees the matter in an entirely 

 different light, and is more inclined to give 

 the protest or denial a reasonable considera- 

 tion. 



DID A COG SLIP ? MORE THAN ONE LARVA IN 

 A QUEEN-CELL. 



Mr. Pritchard called me out to the yard 

 one day this week to see something he had 

 found. He pulled out a frame containing 

 what appeared to be laying-worker drone 

 brood. There was nothing particularly re- 

 markable about that. He then showed me 

 a queen-cell that actually contained nine big 

 fat grubs, presumably all of them drone lar- 

 vae. We opened up other queen- cells, and 

 found from three to five larvae in each. 



Very possibly ihis thing has been reported 

 in these columns; but if so I do not remem- 

 ber it. Evidently nature has made a mis- 

 take, or a "cog has slipped" somewhere. 

 We have had numerous reports of bees 

 building cells with one drone larva in it; but 

 here is a case where there is a decided plu- 

 rality of them. 



handling HOFFMAN FRAMES IN THE FALL. 



At this time of year propolis is unusually 

 abundant, sticky, and, in cool weather, hard. 

 In separating the frames, enter the end of 

 the knife or hive-tool between the points of 

 contact of the frames— that is, between the 

 square edge of one frame and the V edge of 

 the opposmg frame. Push the blade down, 

 then give it a slight twist. If the hive-tool 

 be entered between the top- bars, there is 

 a possibility of splitting off either the V or 

 square edge of one of the frames. Before 

 the middle of September, and after March 

 or April, when the frames are handled the 

 most, Hoffman frames may be separated in 

 any old way without danger of breakage. 



A CORRECTION. 



After the first footnote on page 1032 was 

 printed, A. I. Root sent in some corrections. 

 He meant to say, in the middle of the note, 

 that he " usually has an attack " of his old 

 trouble; also that, ''as a rule," he eats 

 fruit and other things that other people do, 

 while in Northern Michigan. 



