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THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



September 8, 



is no need to begin. The old ideas that " anybody can farm," 

 " anybody can Iteep bees," " anybody can sell honey," have been 

 long since exploded. Constant study, constant vigilance, con- 

 stant work, are necessary in order to the greatest success in 

 anything, and no less so in selling honey than in any other 

 department of human industry. 



It may be a hard question to answer why "Do you want 

 to buy some honey?" won't sell much honey for you in any 

 place on earth, but it won't. Oue reason is the constant 

 variety of ways in which the wholesale dealers approach their 

 trade. People get used to being amused and expect it, and if 

 you intend to make a success where another man made a fail- 

 ure, you must study up new ways to amuse and instruct and 

 educate the people. There is no business which affords greater 

 opportunities for this than selling honey. Your bee-hives, 

 your apiary, your honey-house, are chock-full of things about 

 which the general public knows almost nothing. You will 

 find that the head of a great business house will listen, like 

 unto a fairy tale, to your account of rearing a queen-bee in a 

 hive, especially when illustrated by a queen-cell in your hand. 

 When you start out to-morrow morning, take along with 

 you a brood-frame selected from one of your hives. You will 

 need one that has no larv;e or sealed brood in it. Also take one 

 that has some drone-comb on the lower edge, also one or two 

 queen-cells that have been used, that is, that have hatcht 

 queens. You can get a very nice comb by inserting in a 

 strong colony a brood-frame with half sheet of foundation 

 and leave in two days and then remove it. 



People are very curious about the " manufactured comb," 

 as they call it. If you put in a half sheet of starter, as sug- 

 gested, a good way would be to protect one-fourth the length 

 by thin pieces of boards, so as to keep the bees from drawing 

 it out. Then people can see just what you give the bees and 

 just what work they do upon it. This will save you lots of 

 words of esplantions that would otherwise be necessary. 



My first call is on a mau in the leather business I have 

 known for years. A salesman sitting at his elbow greets me 

 with, "Oh, that is some of the manufactured honey, is it?" I 

 hold up the brood-frame fresh from my bee-hive, covered 

 with propolis in spots and adorned with burr-combs of greater 

 or less size. I say, "Would you accuse a man of fooling his 

 time away sticking beeswax all over on the edges of the 

 wood? What do you think of this red, sticky stuff ? Do you 

 think that adds to the beauty? That we call bee-glue, and a 

 nasty stuflf it is. This frame is just as the bees built it in my 

 bee-hive, except the nails and wood and wire. We make them 

 very strong, as they are part of our capital. We use these 

 frames 15 or 20 years in our hives if we chance to keep bees 

 so long. Just look at this red, yellow, blue and green stuff in 

 the cells of comb. That is bee-bread. The bees store that in 

 the combs to feed their young. Why, my dear sir, this frame 

 of honey-comb bears upon its face the impress of the insects' 

 work, just as much as the spider's web; and you might just 

 as well say, 'Oh, that is a manufactured spider's web,' as to say 

 so about this honey-comb. Just notice the bridge or trestle 

 work construction where the honey-comb is fastened to the 

 wood. A man can't fasten wax to wood in any such way. 

 Look at the six-sided shape of the little wax-buckets the bees 

 have built to hold their winter's supply of honey. Did you 

 notice these big cells on the lower edge of the frame ?" 

 " What are those?" 



" Those are cells to rear the male bees in the bee-hive. 

 Poor fellows, they have no sting to fight with, no honey-sac to 

 gather honey — they don't know how to work wax or feed 

 young bees or gather pollen ; and just as soon as the honey- 

 flow in the flowers stops, they are all put to death without 

 remorse." 



"What is this funny looking thing on the edge of the 

 comb ?" 



" That is a queen-cell. The bees take any worker-egg, 

 build around it one of these big black cells, and feed it five 

 times as much as it can eat, and it hatches in 16 days into a 

 perfect female, capable of laying 2,000 to 3,000 eggs a day 

 in the busy season of two or three years of her life. It would 

 have taken 21 days for this same egg to hatch in the little 

 cell when fed less bountifully." 

 " Isn't that wonderful ?" 



"Yes, sir, that is truly strange even to us who work with 

 the bees constantly, and handle them fearlessly. The study 

 of the bees brings forward new things unlimited in number, 

 even tho you spend your life among the bees." 



" Then, do you mean to say that men don't make comb 

 honey, fill it with glucose, and wax the cells shut with a hot 

 iron, as I have read it in the papers ?" 



" Yes, sir, I say it can't be done. Men are mean enough 

 to do anything, but they can't put the wax together that way 

 at all, and even if they could the cost would be too great. 



CouW you make a honey-comb like this for one dollar, labor 

 and material ? I think not ; but my bees made it for 20 cents 

 or less. Can even the cheap Chinese or Japanese compete 

 with that? I think not. And as to capping wax with a hot 

 iron, that is too ridiculous. Try your hot poker near some 

 honey-comb; it will melt away like frost under the sun." 

 IContlnued next week,! 



The Thumb-Tack Method of Keeping a Record 

 of the Operations in the Apiary. 



BY JOHN ATKINSON. 



Several years ago D. D. Palmer, in the American Bee 

 Journal, advocated the use of small slates with holes drilled 

 In one end to hang them on a nail or screw on the back of the 

 hive for this purpose. I myself use wooden tags in the same 

 way, planing them off w hen they get full of writing ; and vari- 

 ous other devices, such as Root's queen-registering cards, 

 have been and are being used for recording purposes. 



But we often wish to mark frames as well as hives, espe- 

 cially in queen-rearing operations. I^or this purpose Mr. 

 Doolittle and Mr. Alley, in their books on queen-rearing, tell 

 us to scrape off the wax and propolis from the top-bar of a 

 frame, or take off a shaving and write dates, etc., on the top- 

 bar. You scrape a bar or two and your knife becomes so dull 

 it won't scrape worth a cent. If the bar is not well scraped 

 you can't write on it worth a cent. (Did you ever try it, and 

 refrain from profanity? Then you are a daisy.) You think 

 you will " take off a shaving." The top-bar is a little cross- 

 grained, and, of course, you happen to start the knife the 

 wrong way of the grain, and it's a cold day if you do not split 

 the top-bar in two. Then, at the next operation this all has 

 to be done over again, and finally you have taken off so many 

 shavings that the frame is practically spoiled, and, of course, 

 contains a nice, straight, worker-comb which you don't want 

 to lose or transfer into another frame. In short, there is no 

 satisfaction, but lots of disappointments and heart-burnings 

 in this method of keeping a record. 



•Palmer's slates for the outside of the hive were well 

 enough as far as they went, but he had to make them by re- 

 moving the frames from school slates and sawing the slates 

 into small pieces and drilling the holes, thus paying for 

 frames only to throw them away, besides probably spoiling 

 saws and breaking slates in drilling. 



Root's queen-registering cards are probably very handy 

 for keeping a record of the transactions on queen-rearing 

 nuclei, but the pins may easily be moved by accident, thus 

 knocking your record into a " cockt hat," and any cards are 

 easily spoilt by the action of the sun and rain. 



Doolittle keeps some kind of a record with small stones 

 placed in certain positions on the hive-cover. So do I. I open 

 a hive ; in doing so I tip the cover a little, off roll the 

 stones. (Don't talk to me about flat stones — we haven't got 

 'em in this " neck of the woods"), and unless I can remember 

 how they were placed, my record is again gone to the "demni- 

 tion bow-wows." Anyhow, I have to pick them up and re- 

 place them. 



What am I going to do about it? Well, I can't do any- 

 thing but make a suggestion, which is this : That some of the 

 manufacturers of apiarian supplies get us up a set of thumb- 

 tacks similar to those used by draughtsmen to hold their paper 

 on the draught-board, with numbers from 1 to SI, for the 

 days of the month, or more if hives are to be numbered with 

 them, and all the letters of the alphabet stampt or cast in the 

 metal of the tack-heads, put up in boxes or " fonts " contain- 

 ing each several alphabets and several sets of numbers, the 

 box to have a convenlect handle attacht so that it can be 

 easily carried in one hand from hive to hive. 



These thumb-tacks can be easily placed upon a hive-body, 

 the top-bar of a frame, or anything else, and as easily pickt 

 off with the thumb-nail and dropt into their proper compart- 

 ment of the box, and this can be done much quicker than any 

 writing, either on slate, wood, or pasteboard ; would be Imper- 

 vious to the action of the weather ; where used on top-bars of 

 frames it could be easily cleaned of propolis by soaking for a 

 short time in gasolene ; would last a life time if properly cared 

 for — in short they would, in my humble opinion, " take the 

 bakery." 



On page 489, our Boiler gives a quotation from Glean- 

 ings, of Mr. Doolittle's management of pollen-filled combs; 

 says white clover pollen has honey stored over it, and is saved 

 till spring, " care being taken as to worms." I have lots of 

 such combs now in which the bees are just covering the pollen 

 with honey. They will be sealed over after awhile, and if in 

 new comb the pollen may be seen by holding the combs up to 



