Aug. 31, 1899. 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



549 



the honey and the bill of lading-. Money will be forwarded 

 to j-our ag-ent, when, by paying- a small fee, you can take the 

 whole amount of the cash. 



Again : Look out for any firm that makes quotations 

 away above the general market figures. These high prices 

 are put out as baits. You ship to the house, and as soon as 

 the honey is in its hands it will report that the " market 

 has suddenly declined," or that your " honey is of poor 

 quality,"' or that it was " broken in transit," and after a 

 little the house will advise you that the honey was sold for. 

 say, a half what j-ou expected to get for it — may be a good 

 deal less. The concern will be obliged to remit to )'ou ac- 

 cording to that report, after deducting freight, drayage and 

 commission. If you expect to get 15 cents for your honey, 

 you will probably get in cash somewhere about 4 or 5. This 

 thing has been done over and over again — so much so that 

 I feel it is necessary to warn our readers thoroly. 



Still, again, it is a bad plan to ship to a commission 

 house, even tho it is quoted at thousands of dollars, and its 

 honor is above the average, if such house does not make a 

 speciaify of handling honey. It cannot begin to do as well 

 for you as some firm that makes honey a business. 



HOMK-M.\DE SHIPPING-C.4.SKS. 



I have several times spoken of the folly of trying- to put 

 otherwise nice comb honey into poorly constructed or home- 

 made shipping-cases. I know just how our honey-buyers 

 and commission men regard these poor, miserable, clap-trap 

 affairs made at the " ordinary planing-mills around home." 

 A member of a honey firm in Chicago pointed to me a nice 

 lot of honey put up in home-made cases. Said he, " If it 

 had been put up in no-drip shipping-cases of the modern 

 style, the honey would have brought two cents more per 

 pound." The cases he pointed to me held 24 sections each. 

 This would have made a difterence of nearly SO cents per 

 case, and yet I venture to say tiie penny-wise-and-pound- 

 foolish bee-keeper thought that, because he was saving one 

 or two cents on the factory-made cases, he vras just so much 

 ahead. 



Various commission houses in Albany and New York 

 city, Philadelphia and Columbus, emphasized the impor- 

 tance of neat, attractive cases, and in this day of fancy 

 goods and close competition, it would seem as if it should 

 be unnecessary to speak of this. 



A PLE.-i FOR THE COM.MISSION MAX. 



In the foregoing I may have given the impression that 

 nearly all commission houses are " up to the tricks of the 

 trade ;" but that, I am pleased to say, is not the fact. In 

 several cases we have investigated we found the trouble 

 was either due to a lack of experience or because the bee- 

 keeper himself was desirous of getting the "lion's share." 

 The dishonesty is not ahvays on the side of the commis- 

 sion man. The difficulties, when they do come up, however, 

 are mainly those that are the result of inexperience on the 

 part of the bee-keeper, and ignorance of the ordinary meth- 

 ods of doing business — yes, ignorance of the simple princi- 

 ples enunciated above. — Gleanings in Bee-Culture. 



Paste for Labeling Tin. -Put a small quantity of glue 

 broken in small pieces, enough to cover the bottom of a 

 tin vessel with sufficient water to cover it ; when the glue 

 has become quite soft fill up to about three inches deep with 

 vinegar ; put on the fire to boil, and when all the glue is 

 dissolved add fiour until it is thick enough to form a paste 

 — not so stiff as to cut it but so that it will just run. This 

 is said to stick tight to tins, and will not peel oft" in dry 

 weather. — Australian Eee-Keeper. 



Feeding Back to Finish up'Sections. — F. Greiner talks 

 about it in Gleanings in Bee-Culture. The best time for 

 such work is when it is hot with hot nights. But his time 

 for feeding back comes about Sept. 1. By way of experi- 

 ment he has built a little bee-house, double-walled and 

 packt, to hold six colonies. A kerosene lamp holds the tem- 

 perature at 190°, sometimes not being needed in day-time. 



Colonies are selected which were working well at the close 

 of harvest. A contracted brood-chamber is used, preferably 

 a half-story hive. Mr. Gi-einer says : 



'• Each colony may be given two or three supers of un- 

 finisht sections at one time, and a Miller feeder placed on 

 top. This, of course, must be kept filled with diluted honey, 

 which, being kept warm by the heating apparatus, is thus 

 always in good condition to be taken by the bees. Some- 

 times I feed at the entrance also- not by an entrance-feeder, 

 but by piling up at the entrance sections not containing 

 honey enough to justify me in returning to the hive for fin- 

 ishing. All sealed patches must be unsealed, or scratcht 

 with an uncapping-comb — an instrument that might well 

 be offered for sale. When the weather is warm enoug^h all 

 honey will generally be removed from the sections during 

 the night. In cold nights it does not work so well, and the 

 bee-keeper must not fail to remove the sections from the en- 

 trance early in the morning, or trouble and robbing may be 

 the result." 



Black Drops from the Smoker. — F. L. Thompson says 

 in the Progressive Bee-Keeper : 



■• Some time ago a questioner in the American Bee 

 Journal complained that his smoker dropt inky-looking 

 stuff on his nice white sections when smoking the bees out. 

 Dr. Miller advised him to clean his smoker. I happened to 

 have just cleaned my smoker when I read that, and went 

 out in the yard and smoked a few hives, and that black stuff 

 dript around more copiously than I ever knew it to do 

 before." 



Size of Hives. This topic is still to the fore in Glean- 

 ings in Bee-Culture. S. A. Niver says that for their buck- 

 wheat locality the late Mr. Morton settled upon a 9-frame 

 hive containing 8 frames and a dummy. Mr. Niver wants 

 bees to swarm, on this account preferring 8 frames and 

 Carniolans. so that when buckwheat comes there will be 

 plenty of bees instead of having the queen crowded out of 

 the brood-nest by honey stored there earlier. A. N. Draper, 

 working for extracted hone)-, wants big colonies, and if he 

 wants to move an apiary in summer to get an extra flow of 

 honev, it is easier to move a "barn" than two smaller 

 hives'. With the barns there is no trouble sorting out frames 

 to extract. The queen need not go out of the brood-cham- 

 ber to lay, and no frame from the brood-chamber ever goes 

 into the extractor. As a sort of summing^ up, the editor of 

 Gleanings in Bee-Culture says : 



" As the evidence begins to pile in, pro and con. on this 

 subject, it seems light is surely breaking. From all that 

 has been said, if I can interpret correctly from the reports, 

 it would appear that for northern localities the 8-frame ca- 

 pacity is about the right size when running for comb honey ; 

 and it does not matter whether that is in the shape of an 8- 

 frame Langstroth or Danzenbaker 10-frame or two Heddon 

 8-frame brood-chambers, all three being of about the same 

 capacity. For other localities, and particularly in the 

 South, a larger hive seems to be better for the production 

 of extracted honey. Some think a 10-frame Langstroth is 

 quite large enough. Others, like Mr. Draper and the Da- 

 dants. believe that a 10-frame Ouinby, or what has recently 

 been introduced as the Draper barn, is the thing. 



" It was O. O. Poppleton. one of the most careful and 

 conservative bee-keepers there is in the whole land — one 

 who has produced honey in Illinois and Florida both by the 

 ton and by the carload — who says that a comb-honey hive 

 cannot also be a good extracting- one, or something to that 

 effect ; that the one designed for liquid honey should have a 

 large capacity, and that for comb smaller, so that this ques- 

 tion of large and small hives, after all. simmers itself down 

 to a matter of locality and condition of market. If there is 

 more money in producing extracted honey, then it is folly 

 to produce comb ; and one should study well his locality, 

 and then decide on the style of hive. 



" It is P. H. Elwood who beg-an with the Hetherington- 

 Quinby, 10 of which frames would make a very large hive, 

 and now I believe he uses only five or six such frames in 

 the production of comb honey. These would give an equiv- 

 alent capacity, if I am not mistaken, of an ordinary 8-frame 

 Langstroth. On the other hand, the Dadants started with 

 a Quinby, pure and simple, and they have been producing 

 extracted honey, and have continued along with the origi- 

 nal Ouinbv, y and 10 frames." 



The Premiums offered on page 557 are well worth work- 

 ing for. Look at them. 



