1898. 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



203 



supplies are not In general use, that are ordered at the factory, 

 there is always an extra charge for setting the machinery ; so 

 the standard. If not the best, Is the cheapest." Besides, the 

 probability is that standard goods have become standard gfin- 

 erally just because they are the best. — Progressive BeeKeeper. 



Italian vs. Black Bees. — J. E. Crane started out an 

 enthusiast for Italians, but In an experience of years found 

 that in some cases blacljs were ahead. In Review be says he 

 believes that in localities where dark honey abounds, dark 

 bees will beat, even if this is true for only part of the season, 

 while in sections where clover and linden abounds with rarely 

 much dark honey, Italians are the thiug. 



Preparing for a Dry Year. — Callfornians seem to be 

 rather looking for a year of failure for lack of rain. J. James, 

 in the Pacific Bee Journal, advises saving the expense of 

 having to feed a big lot of bees by confining the queen on four 

 frames by a division-board with a piece of excluder-zinc 4x6 

 inches. Then if the outlook is good next season, take away 

 the division-board Feb. 1 and feed freely. 



Wants Some Drones. — Hasty, the Reviewer, thinks the 

 workers will not be satisfied without some drones, and it isn't 

 best to cross them In this too sharply. If there's no drone-comb 

 in brood-chamber the queen will lay In sections unless excluder 

 or full sheets of foundation in sections are used, neither of 

 which he wants to be forced to, so he wants In the two outside 

 combs quite a bit more than Doollttle's 4 to 6 square inches. 



Double Duty on Half Rations.— Editor Bennett, of the 

 Pacific Bee Journal, seems to be starting out in good shape to 

 meet the failure of the honey harvest, If failure It Is. He eats 

 only dinner and supper, no tea, coffee, sugar, pie or cake, plain 

 food with lots of honey, doing twice the work on half he for- 

 merly ate. But Hasty is warned that a novelette will start in 

 again. Takes an unfair advantage of Hasty by saying a lady 

 will write it. 



Numbers of Bees Rather than Colonies seem to be pre- 

 ferred by D. W. Heise(Canadlan Bee Journal.) In his locality 

 a man started with 35 weak colonies and got 900 pounds of 

 surplus. Two miles from this man another started with 20 

 strong colonies and got 2,000 pounds — 26 pounds per colony 

 In one case, 100 In the other. Such a result might generally 

 be expected, altho sometimes a distance of two miles makes a 

 big difference In the harvest. 



Bees Necessary for Growing Crops. — Albert Gale, in 

 Agricultural Gazette, as quoted In Australian Bee-Bulletin, 

 makes the vigorous assertion that if the native flora are wholly, 

 or nearly wholly, cleared from the land to the extent of giving 

 insufficient storage for the bees, so as to decimate them to the 

 extent of their numerical inability to carry on the necessary 

 work of fertilization, " the result will be more disastrous than 

 drouths or floods, because our fruit trees, etc., would cease to 

 yield their crops." 



No-Bee- Way Section. — The South Texas Convention de- 

 cided "that the said section was no Improvement over the old 

 section." The Southland queen Is down on them hard. 

 Doesn't like them — wouldn't like plain bedsteads without scal- 

 lops — honey doesn't look so well In plain sections and won't 

 sell as well — but wants to hear more about them. Is going to 

 m£»ke something better than fence-separators — sawed wood- 

 separators with perforations seven Inches long. Evidently 

 fences and plain sections don't suit that "locality." 



Space Under Hives. — The question has been askt 

 whether the bees are not hindered about getting to the combs 

 by having a hive raised. Doollttle says, in Progressive Bee- 

 Keeper, that this can make no difference, for the cluster comes 

 down to the bottom. That swarming is overcome by raising 

 the hive was proved a myth years ago, when there was plenty 

 of swarming with all hives raised. After having tried that 

 and various other bottom-boards, however, he strongly favors 

 the Dr. Miller bottom-board with a shallow side for summer, 

 and the other side, two inches deep, for winter. 



Controlling Swarming at Out-Yards. — The editor of 

 Gleanings says the question of preventing swarming In out- 

 yards run for comb honey Is a poser, but he tells how he man- 

 aged last year, having few swarms, altho some honey went 

 into extractlng-combs. All queens were dipt, or entrances 

 covered with queen-traps. Toward the swarming season he 



put on a second story with one or two frames of brood from 

 below, filling up with empty combs or frames of foundation. 

 After the upper story was pretty well filled with brood or 

 honey, in some cases he put a super of sections on top of the 

 whole, while In other cases he took off the upper story and put 

 two section supers In Its place, crowding all the brood possible 

 Into the lower story, and reserving the frames of honey for 

 winter stores or extractlne. 



Paint for Hives. — R. C. Aikin says he has tried paint of 

 all colors, and a hive painted stroight Idack was the worst he 

 ever had for swarming. Has had many dark red, and thinks 

 Ihey get too hot and cause swarming. Prefers light shades. 

 Doollttle thinks hives should stand in shade from 8:30 to 4:30 

 o'clock, in which case color will make no difference. But he 

 thinks bees do much the best in hives not painted at all. If the 

 hives have single walls. If there's any rjood reason for paint 

 other than looks, he has never seen it advanced. He wouldn't 

 let any one paint his single-walled hives for $L.O0 each. It 

 would lose him $2.00 In honey, because It would hinder early 

 breeding. — Progressive Bee-Keeplng. 



Thinks Hasty Has Fears.— Dr. Miller having said in 

 Gleanings that when a new queen was given to a cross colony 

 there seemed to be a change In the temper of the bees, so soon, 

 that It must have been the presence of the queen that made 

 the difference, and Hasty having commented thereon In Re- 

 view, the Progressive Bee-Keeper's Somnambulist thus com- 

 ments on Hasty's comments : 



"One more fragment that I espied along the way was this, 

 from that Bachelor Hasty, or hasty Bachelor, of the Review : 



" 'May it not be that all bees, Immediately after re-queen- 

 ing, haul in their horns a bit, and feel as If homo were hardly 

 worth fighting for ?' 



" Now, where did he get that notion ? No question of its 

 originality ; and If that's the way he feels, small wonder there's 

 no queen to his establishment." 



W. L. Coggshall's Bee-Keeping.— E. R. Root, In Glean- 

 ings, tells something of a visit to this man, who, he says, "runs 

 over 1,000 colonies." (A wicked friend suggests that they 

 can hardly be his own bees, or he wouldn't stir them all up by 

 running over them.) Rapidity of manipulation seems to be 

 the order of the day, and stings ! A hand-cart holding four 

 extractlng-supers with an empty super on It is taken to a hive, 

 hive-cover removed, quilt lifted a little way, smoke blown 

 under, quilt flopt up and down sucking the smoke down Into 

 the hive; when -,; the bees have gone down the first frame is 

 lifted from super, shaken in front of hive, and if any bees are 

 left on the comb, a sweep or two of Coggshall's broom removes 

 them, then the remaining frames are shaken into the super. 

 When the super is emptied It Is not pried off the hive, but jerkt 

 or kickt off, making the bees mad, of course, but they take 

 the stings and save the time. Then a second, third and fourth 

 hive is visited, and the load taken to the extractor. The 

 editor, while looking on, kept poking his hands deeper into his 

 pockets, and the stings kept going deeper in his clothes, but 

 the men workt away as If it was an every-day matter to work 

 in a cloud of stings. 



Two Bad Men — Too Bad. — "So shines a good deed in a 

 naughty world," runs the quotation, but that very shining 

 makes the shiner a conspicuous target for the evil-minded. 

 Just because this Boiler shows such startling originality In the 

 items given in this department, thus giving to the world Ideas 

 that otherwise never would have been born, D. W. Heise, of 

 the Canadian Bee Journal, and Hasty, of the Bee-Keepers' Re- 

 view — a man that has to eat 12 ounces of honey a day to keep 

 him sweet — with fiendish malignity sorely wound the tender 

 feelings of the Boiler. The Kanuck gets mad and calls names 

 because some choice morsel he was gloating over Is scoopt and 

 brought to light In a weekly, some two or three weeks ahead 

 of Its intended advent in a monthly. But say, Helse, what's a 

 body to do when he's overloaded with original Ideas ? Would 

 you have him hold on to them and " bust his biler ?" 



Instead of standing off at an admiring distance, Hasty has- 

 the audacity to come close up and measure his own little 

 height, saying he Is "getting jealous." Yet he seems to have 

 sense enough left to fear he will be accused of egotism, as he 

 expresses it, " for even putting my [his] head up that hlgh."^ 

 The Idea of such a man as Hasty, who can never clearly ex- 

 press what he has to say, and whose style is so dull that It 

 must be a second-hand affair that some one has thrown away, 

 comparing his prosy platitudes with the brilliant scintlllatlona 

 of this deponent I Perish the thought ! 



