106 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



Feh. 17, 



The Price of Success. — "I never saw a successful bee- 

 keeper who was not, in all kinds of weather, thinking about 

 his bees."— C. P. Dadant, in Busy Bee. 



Saving Sweet Clover Seed. — " I once gathered a bushel 

 in two hours by pushing au inverted umbrella up close to the 

 stalk, and an assistant bent the stalks over it and beat off the 

 seed with a stick."— J. B. Hains, in Gleanings. 



Tips and Dovsrns. — In 1896 Dr. Stell was reported in 

 Southland Queen as producing In Mexico from 10 colonies 

 1,500 pounds of honey that he sold at a dollar a pound. In 

 1897 the case is reverst. From 18 colonies increast to 40, 

 he got only 22 pounds of honey after paying out .5240 for 

 supplies. 



Extracting in Parts.— Hasty in Review thinks it might 

 be a good plan to avoid extracting unripe honey to have two 

 extracting-supers on at a lime, extracting alternately, or else 

 having only one super and extracting alternately the two 

 halves, thus giving a chance for better ripening to the part to 

 be extracted. 



Wax in Bee-Glue.— M. Bertrand, editor Revue, sent to 

 Dr. de Planta a sample of the material used by bees to con- 

 tract the entrance of a straw hive. The analysis showed : 

 Beeswax, 76.27; resia (propolis), 22.15; water and volatile 

 oils, 1.58; total, 100. Probably many beekeepers would be 

 surprisfld to find the large amount of wax they could secure 

 by melting up what they may think pure propolis. 



Are Drones a Help to Workers P— Some think that 

 workers are more energetic if drones are present in the col- 

 ony. Editor Hutchinson thinks that even if the presence of 

 drones is an encouragement to the workers, there's no need 

 of a big lot. He says : " Two or three hundred in each col- 

 ony, if they are anyways smart drones at all, ought to be able 

 to give the workers all of the ' patting on the back ' that is 

 necessary." 



TheJBee Not Cold-Blooded. — Karl Gruendig, indeutsche 

 Imker, combats the assertion of Dzierzon that the bee has no 

 heat of its own, but takes the heat of surrounding objects. 

 Because a bee becomes chilled and apparently lifeless when 

 separated from its companions, it is subjected to a tempera- 

 ture of 40-", and it is not safe to assume that it has no heat of 

 its own, no more than it would be right to say a man is cold- 

 blooded because when the temperature is low enough he 

 freezes. 



Peep-Holes and Plain Sections. — A strong point claimed 

 for plain sections with fences is the lack of peep-holes in the 

 corners. S. A. Niver asks Gleanings not to put that point too 

 strong, continuing, " There are peep-holes in every box of honey 

 Morton has ever produced. Danzenbaker had one section 

 with nary a peep-hole— the only one I ever saw. To be sure, 

 the fence helps to reduce the size of 'om, but they are there all 

 the same." But W. D. Super says L. A. Aspinwall has 3,000 

 pounds in plain sections worth seeing, " square as a piece of 

 plank, and no holes in corners at all." Niver's sharp eyes are 

 pretty reliable. 



Plain and Old-Style Sections.— Over the title, " An 

 Object- Lesson in Comb-Building," the Review gives a delight- 

 ful full-page half-tone picture of four plain sections beauti- 

 fully filled with four old-style sections placed over them, 

 . decidedly to the disadvantage of the latter. The old-style 

 sections lack wry much of belug filled out as well as the 

 others. The editor says "it is a fair representation of such 

 honey that 7 hav9 seen produced in the two classes of sec- 

 tions." It would be much more to the point if he could have 

 said, "These sections were produced by the same bees at the 

 same time in the same super." 



Profits of Bee-Keeping.— The editor of Gleanings has 

 been trying to get Dr. Miller to tell what his 1897 crop of 

 17,000 pounds of honey cost In labor. "After some think- 

 ing, estimating and guessing," the Doctor makes out about 



293 days at 10 hours each as the amount of time occupied 

 with the bees for the year, supposing that one person had 

 done everything. As a matter of fact, the work was mainly 

 done by two persons, making the time for each less than half 

 the working days of the year. Three-fourths of the work 

 came between May 1 and Oct. 1. Then the editor makes an 

 estimate after deducting expenses for supplies, interest, etc., 

 and counts that if the Doctor got 10 cents for his honey it 

 would leave !t!5.00 per day for the labor. But fairness obliges 

 him to admit that such results are not attainable every year. 



A New Theory. — Herr Ludwig has evolved a theory that 

 is considered of sufficient Importance to allow A. Bohnensten- 

 gel to occupy more than four pages of Imker aus Boehmen in 

 refuting it. Instead of a worker or a queen proceeding from 

 the same germ, according to the food given, the theory is that 

 every fertilized egg contains two diffarent germs, one capable 

 of producing a queen, the other a worker. Under ordinary 

 circumstances the worker is developt, and under extraordinary 

 circumstances the queen, and a nurse-bee has three different 

 glands by which it can at will give food that will awaken the 

 latent drone, worker or queen germ. The theory will hardly 

 gain general credence. 



"Hybrid Bees are not, as a rule, so pleasant to 

 handle as are the pure Italians," says Editor Hutchinson in 

 the Review. " Mr. Whitcomb, of Nebraska, explains this on 

 the ground that it takes longer to subdue the hybrids. We 

 can give the Italians a few whiffs of smoke and then go right 

 to work handling them. Not so the hybrids. First give them 

 some smoke and then busy yourself with something else for a 

 few minutes; then give them some more and wait a little be- 

 fore opening the hive. The point is that it takes longer to sub- 

 due them, but once they are subdued Mr. Whitcomb says they 

 are as easily handled as the pure Italians." 



Preventing After-Swarms. — The favorite way with 

 many is to set the swarm in the place of the old colony, put- 

 ting the old colony at the tilne, or a week later, in a new 

 place, thus weakening the old colony so it will give up swarm- 

 ing. But L. Stachelhausen objects to this plan in Texas, as 

 he wants the mother colony to remain strong enough to yield 

 a surplus. Cutting out cells immediately after swarming will 

 not do, as the bees may start new ones. Sj he gives a virgin 

 queen to the old colony as soon as it casts a swarm, lifting a 

 corner of the enamel cloth and letting the queen run down 

 with as little disturbance as possible, and in nine cases out of 

 ten the young queen is accepted — Southland Queen. 



No. 3— Deacon JouNSiNG — " Lawd ! Lawd ! Dat roost mus' be 

 on iiah ! 



■»~»~^ 



Spelling Reform Again.— In the Chicago Post 

 of recent date we find the following : 



"The editor of a leading London daily newspaper has 

 received a number of urgent protests against his recent 

 adoption of the American omission of the ' u ' in words labor, 

 and the cutting off of the final ' me ' in programme. The pro- 

 tests argue that the best American writers and publishers 

 themselves are showing a desire to abandon this, as, they 

 think it a butchery of the English tongue." 



We wonder if some of our conservative friends who object 

 to spelling " stopt " instead of "stopped "are willing to join 

 the backward reform to write "labour," "honour," etc. 

 Then if that is done, they can hardly stop logically of going 

 back to earlier forms still, giving a language that people now 

 living couldn't read at all. Fact is, some good people can't 

 stand any reform, however good, .if it's different from what 

 they were brot up to. 



