428 



AMERICAN BEt: JOURNAL-. 



In this department will be answered those 

 n,,Pstk)n8 needing immediate attention, and 

 S as are not of sufficient special interest to 

 rpnnire replies from the 20 or more apiarists 

 X" hefpC make -'Queries and Keph^s^' bo 

 intprestinK on another page. In the main, ii 

 will contain questions and answers upon mat- 

 ters that particularly interest beginners.-ED. 



Feeding Bees for Winter. 



Is glucose a good thing to feed bees 

 . for them to winter on ? I have 10 or 1^ 

 colonies that will have to be fed as the 

 the season was poor here, and I had one 

 swarm on Aug. 24th. I want to carry 

 them through the winter by feeding, 

 and at as small expense as possible. 

 Dyersburg, Tenn. N. B. Graves. 



Answer.— Decidediy no. Don't fool 

 with anything but the best granulated 

 sugar. Make the syrup as given in the 

 books, and if you have extracted honey 

 that you know was not taken from foul- 

 broody hives, take Doolittle's plan, and 

 to every two pounds of syrup add a 

 pound of honey. 



Rocky Mountain Bee-Plant. 



I send a sample of a plant that grows 

 wild here. It comes up also in the 

 wheat-stubble after the wheat is cut. 

 From what I can make out from the 

 description in the "A B C of Bee-Cul- 

 ture," it is the spider-plant. I hnd the 

 large drop of honey which Mr. Root 

 describes. It stays in the flower until 

 after 9 o'clock a.m. I find the bees 

 feeding on it considerable. 



Guthrie, O. T. F. N. Gardiner. 



Answer. —It is doubtless spider-plant 

 or Rocky Mountain bee-plant, as both 

 grow in that region. Both are showy, 

 and excellent honey-plants. 



and in about two hours after that they 

 were all lying on the ground dead in 

 front of the hives. Why did they go 

 into the other hives ? Why did the other 

 bees not accept them ? 



2. There is a very small bee around 

 here, and it works on the sunflowers. I 

 have never seen it on anything else, and 

 it is not half as large as a honey-bee. It 

 gathers pollen, and its movements are 

 very quick, and its legs are very hairy. 

 Can you tell me what kind of a bee it is? 



3. I am a beginner. I commenced 

 last spring with one colony, and now I 

 have eight, all doing well and storing 

 lots of honey. Some of them are work- 

 ing in the third set of sections. I have 

 a fine honey-extractor and a solar wax- 

 extractor that does fine work, all of 

 which I made myself. 



G. R. McCartney. 

 Rockford, Ills., Aug. 21, 1893. 



Answers.— 1. Your conundrum is a 

 hard one. It isn't an easy thing to lell 

 why bees do many of the things that 

 they do. There is, however, nothing so 

 very unusual in what your bees did. 

 For some reason the bees did not go off, 

 possibly because something hindered the 

 queen from going with them, and then 

 in a demoralized way they settled on 

 three different hives, and the two 

 strange colonies not desiring accessions 

 at that time ruthlessly slaughtered the 

 intruders. ^ , 



2. We are not sufficiently posted on 

 wild bees to give you the name of the one 

 that worked on sunflowers. 



3. If you started with one colony in 

 the spring, and have brought that up to 

 eight, with part of them working on the 

 third set of sections, and you have done 

 remarkably well. Make sure that some 

 of them are not too weak in bees or 

 stores to winter through. The chief 

 question is, not how many you have 

 now, but how many colonies you will 

 have alive next spring. 



Swarming, Wild Bees, Etc. 



1. 1 had one of my first swarms to cast 

 a swarm yesterday. It was a small one, 

 and I did not see what hive it came out 

 of, but I examined them to-night and 

 found a hive with 14 queen-cells in it ; 

 one of the cells has a queen in it, and 

 one nice one where the queen has come 

 out of it, and the rest of the queen-cells 

 arc torn to pieces. Part of the swarm 

 clustered on that hive, and part on two 

 other hives close bv. The bees all went 

 into the hives that they clustered on, 



One of the Golden-Rods. 



I send a flower that blooms here dur- 

 ing this month. Please tell what it is. 

 C. E. Phenicie. 

 Tacoma, Wash., Sept. 15. 1893. 



Prof. Cook replies to the foregoing as 

 follows : 



This plant is one of the numerous 

 species of golden-rods. The Pacific 

 species are distinct from ours, and the 

 variations are so pronounced that it is 

 necessary to have an entire plant to 



