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AMERICAN BEE JOUFNAL- 



May 25, 1899. 



-«»«i 



The "Old Reliable" seen throug^h New and Unreliable Olasses. 

 By " COOITATOR." 



GETTING THE PUBMC TO EAT JIONEY. 

 The Chicago convention was just level on the subject 

 of getting the public to eat more honey. First reach their 

 ears ; and then be careful about putting any ill-tasting 

 honey into their mouths. Don't you know, honesty, altho 

 the right policy, is not always the hat policy ? Best policy 

 sometimes has to go a long way beyond honesty. It's 

 honest to sell poor honej-, if j'ou make the customer under- 

 stand just what he is getting ; but it's better policy for you 

 not to do anything of the kind — kill your customers, and 

 you haven't got any too m.iny now. 



HIVES WARM IN SPRING AND FAI.L AND COOI. IN SUMMER. 



But how to have black (the warmest color) on the hives 

 spring and fall, and white, the coolest color in the summer, 

 that problem seems rather to have floored the Chicago con- 

 vention. Pres. Beers' suggestion of painting twice a year 

 was none too practical. Tough job to paint a black hive 

 white. A black hive completely shaded in hot weather 

 seems to have been the nearest they got — none too near. 

 Page 229. No one said double-walled hive, with the outer 

 shell painted on both sides, and so joined at the corners as 

 to be capable of being turned inside out. I have made a 

 good many unpainted hives look respectable and white by 

 tacking on cheap cotton cloth. I rather like the plan. In 

 similar style a black hive could be surfaced with white cot- 

 ton for summer, and " peeled " for autumn, if any one 

 thought the matter important enough to pay for the trouble. 



MAKING THE HONEY-LEAFLET EFFECTIVE. 



The honey-leaflet (see editorials on page 232) is not self- 

 enforcing, as indolent temperance folks would like a pro- 

 hibitory law to be. Not much use to throw them around, in 

 this day of advertisements knee-deep. But if you can afford 

 to stir up a person's interest a little in the first place, and 

 then give him a leaflet, some results will be likely to follow. 

 In short, the leaflet, like any other tool, must have a work- 

 man to use it. 



CURIOUS REASON FOR PROSPERITY OK BEES. 



" Johnstown," on page 231, has a curious reason for the 

 prosperity of bees in the Heddon hive — don't get meddled 

 with so much by their bee-feverish master. Very possibly 

 that would cut quite a figure in some cases. 



BANKING HIVES WITH SNOW — "LONG-IDEA" HIVES. 



Mrs. Axtell's experience (page 251) is quite an unusual 

 one, and her prompt way of meeting it seems commendable. 

 Bees taken out of the cellar April 1, or thereabouts, and be- 

 fore they had any flight a foot of snow came. Next, some 

 enticing sunshine came along, and of course the poor bees, 

 having been restrained all winter, wanted to fly. Now some 

 sa)' that bees which die on snow are merely bees that come 

 out on purpose to die, and the only proper course is to let 

 alone. Mrs. A. evidently belongs to the opposite (and I 

 guess more numerous) party who regard as a calamity a 

 grand flight when soft snow covers everything ; ergo, she 

 kept them in with well-bankt snow. She doesn't narrate 

 the end of the struggle, whether it proved like holding a 

 dog by its ears or not. The bee's strongest flight-maxim 

 seems to be to keep its back toward the illuminated half of 

 the cosmos. The snow-covered ground being brighter than 

 the sky, it tries to fly with its back toward the ground- -and 

 makes a wreck of his voyage. Even if it gets up and starts 

 again, inborn obstinacy makes it do the same thing right 

 over again, until too cold to fly at all. 



And so Mr. Poppleton still uses and champions the 

 long-idea hive. First we know it will have another run ; 

 and if so we want to keep in mind some things told us on 

 page 227. Neither Langstroth nor Gallup frames suitable 

 (needs a deeper frame), and 16 frames not enough ; hive 

 .should hold 24 at least, and a capacity of 28 would be better. 



i^UEENS LAYING AT WILL. 



Paragraph 6 of " Beedom Boiled Down," page 250, 

 hardly .sounds candid, altho in a measure correct. The 



queen can lay at will. She also can refrain from laying for 

 a certain length of time. What she cannot do is to refrain 

 inde/iuilety when fully distended with ripe eggs. Probably 

 the length of time she can refrain differs greatly under 

 varying circumstances — time much less when she is laying 

 1,000 eggs a day and 2,000 on Sunday, than when only de- 

 positing 200 a day. In order to have Mr. Dadant's remark 

 amount to much of anj'thing, we would have to infer that 

 the queen, in the ordinary quiet of existence in an 8-frame 

 hive wastes eggs for want of any place to lay them. Cogi- 

 tator, for one, doesn't propose to believe that without con- 

 siderable proof. 



"FIGHTING UPON THE INTRODUCTION OF A QUEEN." 



There is an inference in paragraph 9, page 250, that 

 might as well be halted to await proof. Natural enough to 

 infer that a queen cannot be harmed when not a hostile bee 

 can touch her ; but when the whole cage is balled solid with 

 infuriated bees, ejecting^ poison, and the queen has to exist 

 for hours in an atmosphere thick with poison, it looks as if 

 she might he damaged to some extent thereby. Cogitator 

 has a suspicion that half of that pint of dead Ijees were not 

 killed by stings, but by too great and long-continued nerve 

 excitement, aided by poison taken otherwise than by in- 

 jection. 



FEARS EXCESSIVE AS TO APIS DORSAT.\. 



I rather feel that our editor and Dr. Miller are excessive 

 in their fears of Apis dorsata, if allowed to run wild in the 

 South. May be they are right, tho. Looks to 'Tater as if 

 the decrease of regular honey crops by such a cause would 

 be small, if not infinitesimal ; while the enlargement of the 

 poor man's resources, by gathering beeswax, and his larder 

 by gathering wild honey, would be quite cheerful in these 

 days of monopolies, and of destruction to the independent 

 means of livelihood. 



EX-EDITOR ABBOTT DESERVES HOMAGE. 



Homage to the man who would rather be <M'-editor, and 

 a clean man, than fat-ox editor and his hands sooty with 

 degrading and swindling advertisements. This means E. 

 T. Abbott — see page 249. Also, I like the ring of Abbott's 

 article on page 245. Not of more importance for us to bark 

 at the big financial seizers and Caesars than it is for us to 

 get after flat, straight-out dishonesty in the sales between 

 man and man. 



"AGIN" THE FEEDING OF SUGAR SYRUP. 



On page 245, W. W. McNeal also stands up for common 

 honesty, dealing stalwart blows to the practice of stuffing 

 the brood-chamber, just before harvest, with sealed sugar 

 sj'rup. And he gets iii a left-hander that some of us had 

 not fully considered before, where he says that such a per- 

 formance (in addition to its dishonesty) " will most certainly 

 be done at the expense of brood or numerical strength." 



A DANCING ELDER -\ND THE RHEUM.\TISM-DOCTORS. 



And so the Elder, who doesn't believe in dancing,, 

 danced when the little hot-tailed rheumatism-doctors got in 

 their work. Well, they cured the patient in 24 hours, which 

 regular doctors do not always do ; and they were rather 

 unique among successful physicians in making no charge- 

 that is, no charge except charge bayonets. See page 244. 



SLIGHTLY CLIPPING QUEENS RATHER RISKY. 



Clipping queens slightly before mating, to insure mat- 

 ing near home, must be risky indeed if the Michigan Agri- 

 cultural College had onlv 4 mated out of 62 so dipt. Page 

 241. 



IMPURE MATING AFFECTING THE QUEEN HERSELF. 



It is of interest to .see, on page 244, that Doolittle casts- 

 in his lot with those who hold that impure mating affects, 

 the queen herself, and thru her exerts a slight but perceptible 

 influence on her drone offspring. Of course this is much 

 less than the one-half influence exerted on the female off- 

 spri'ng, but there is no use to deny its realitj' (if it is real> 

 as it is perfectly comprehensible, and not unscientific. 

 Cogitator (in a mild way, and on other people's observation 

 rather than his own) joined the same crowd quite awhile 

 ago. 



Experiments to settle the matter positively should be 

 made, Mr. D. well points out, on German bees, or some- 

 really pure race, not on such a high-mixt and sport-inclined 

 race as the Italians. 



HOW ABOUT DIFFERENCE IN MATING ? 



And the boys will surely ask how it is that at Mr. Doo- 

 little's out-apiary one queen out of six showed extra-banded; 



