806 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL, 



Dec. 21, 1899. 



The " Old Reliable " seen thru New and Unreliable Glasses. 

 By E. E. HASTV, Richards, Ohio. 



STOP EXTRACTING UNCAPT HONEY. 



No doubt there is some iincapt honey that is sound and 

 will keep — and certainly there is some capt honey that will 

 ferment and spoil — but not enough in volume of either kind 

 that it oug-ht to prevent a pretty strict enforcement of the 

 general rules. The man who says some unsealed honey is 

 ripe is simply pushing a special plea to excuse liimself in 

 doing wrong. Some farmers are willing to liave tlieir 

 hickory-nuts taken without asking. Some ladies do not 

 object to having tobacco-smoke drifted in tlieir faces. Some 

 individuals will not take a contagious disease, no matter 

 how carelessly the germs are scattered around. The point 

 is, that decent and well-meaning people do not act upon 

 these exceptional cases, but upon the general rules. And 

 the general rule is (and this general is a senior Major Gen- 

 eral, too) that uncapt honey is not fit to put on the market. 

 Immense damage is done the honey market, and great 

 wrong is done the honest producer, by those who cheaply 

 produce tons of half-ripened stuff not fit to be sold at all. 

 Thej- want the price set by the man who put in the work 

 necessarj- to produce a good article, and then they want to 

 float their article off without putting in the work. By the 

 way, is there an3' one who will knozvingly buy a barrel of 

 this unripe stuff except the man ivho intends to mi.v tzvo- 

 t/iirds g'tucose zvi'tti it, a.nd so make it keep? The conven- 

 tion, as reported on page 709, did something in the way of 

 rebuking this evil, but they were not half hot enough. 



GETTING THE .\MOUNT OF WINTER STORES. 



Mr. Doolittle, in his excellent wintering article, page 

 709, gets after one plan with a sharp stick, which rather 

 seems to me to be good enough — the plan, not the stick — no, 

 plan good enough, and stick too good. This refers to the 

 plan of weighing each hive in the gross, first knowing what 

 the weight of emptj' hive, combs and bees ought to be. Is 

 there much more danger of figuring wrongly by this plan 

 than there is of guessing too large by the plan which he 

 recommends? Anent the matter of how much winter stores 

 is really on hand, I think a great lot of bee-folks say, " My 

 bees have 20 pounds " (or more) when really they have only 

 14. .In fact, an 8-frame brood-nest containing 14 pounds of 

 actual honey looks pretty well filled. Frames in the brood- 

 chamber don't hold like those in the super ; and empty 

 combs from the super don't weigh like those from the brood- 

 chamber. 



DROWNING WAX-WORMS IN COMBS. 



Wax- worms, when they get big, are very hard to kill 

 by the ordinarj' method. For a small number of combs I 

 judge that Mr. Glasspole's method, given on page 714. 

 would be excellent. Drown them — drown them thoroly, till 

 they are dead, dead, dead. Then throw out the water with 

 the extractor, and dry the combs in warm air. Who knows 

 how long combs can be kept full of water without damage, 

 as a preventive against eggs hatching ? 



THAT CELLULOID VEIL. 

 Rambler's celluloid veil (page 715) — well, I opine it will 

 have quite a tussle of it to get general recognition and cur- 

 rency. Nevertheless, perhaps it may have a legitimate 

 place. 



SEXTUPLETS — A "NO NONSENSE" API.ARY. 



Do they have .sextuplets in place of twins in old Clear- 

 field Countj' ? Looks like it in that apiary picture on pag'e 

 721. Perhaps the arrangement and a slight lack of clear- 

 ness in the half-tone is responsible for that impression. 

 And the apiary ? Why, that seems to be the ordinary api- 

 ary of the '• no nonsense " sort — unless you call comfortable 

 shade for the heated bee-man to work in, a varietj' of "non- 

 sense." 



SOME ENDURING POETRY. 



Almost afraid I shall not do justice to Mr. Secor's poem, 

 page 722. It is a good one. As a poet he knows unusually 

 well how to avoid the two opposite evils of too much dignity 



and too little dignity in a paper of this kind. (Coals of fire 

 on his head, for putting us critics among the humbugs.) 

 And some of his couplets have a force and inclination to 

 stick which seem to speak of permanence — e. g.: 



" With a silvery tongfue which for smoothness 

 Beats lightning- and tallow combined." 



Or this one — 



" Would you get the most eggs from a turkey. 

 Just humor her whims, in the main." 



BAD BUSINESS GROUNDWORK — PORTO RICAN HONEY. 



What a sad sentence is that of W. A. Selser, on page 

 724: "Misrepresentation and falsehood are the ground- 

 work upon which a large percentage of salesmen try to 

 build up their business." And the pity of it is that no man 

 can deny it. If it were only untrue how pleasant it would 

 be for a critic to cuff his ears. 



Mr. Selser gives a portentous fact where he tells us that 

 Porto Rico is already shipping us honey, and that the 

 bakers have already found out that it decidedly excels all 

 American extracted in power to keep a cake moist. Now I 

 have a sneaking suspicion that all there is to that alleged 

 fact is that the Porto Rican producer cannot (owing to the 

 tropical climate) extract his honey unripe, and get it to the 

 United States market without having it spoil on his hands. 

 If that's it, it may be decidedly a blessing in disguise to us 

 to have some of our heavy fellows rudely kickt out of their 

 bad habits by competition from our new island. 



TH.\T NEW "NEW YORK BEE-DISEASE." 



And so it is the New York bee-disease that we are to 

 make room for next. Can hardly say, " Thanks," or even 

 " Thanks awfully." The genesis of new diseases, affecting 

 man and beast and plant and insect, is one of the wonderful 

 things of this wonderful universe we live in. These trouble- 

 some novelties seem to come around very much more fre- 

 quentl}' than they used to. It is even soberly suggested 

 that germs come to us as dust from the planetary spaces 

 which develop on reaching earth, and go into business each 

 according to his kind. On the whole, I'd sooner lay it to 

 the transportation of germs from one part of the world to 

 another — said transportation stirring up variation, atid 

 variation etiabling them to take a new habitat, and open up 

 a new business — to-wit, a new disease. Dr. Howard is good 

 authority ; and if he saj's the new mephitis the York-Staters 

 have under the floor of their back shed is not pickled-brood, 

 probably it's so. Page 732. 



SOMETHING FOR QUEEN-BREEDERS. 



An enormous bug in the ear, W. C. Gathright proceeds 

 to give the queen-breeders, page 731. I'm not a queen- 

 breeder, and not qualified to pronounce judgment, but if it 

 is true that bees always remove all the royal jelly given to 

 selected larva;, the professionals ought to have found it out 

 long ago. If the bees do this they most likely do it roughly, 

 doing the tender queen-elect no particular good in the 

 process. 



CHE.\P GERM.\N BEES AND QUEENS. 



Those mentioned on page 730 are not so very far away 

 from what we would be willing to duplicate, after all. The 

 time of the year, and the hit-or-miss kind of stock that they 

 are, are facts to be considered. Fall swarms, such as would 

 require three united to be first-class for wintering, are not 

 so very cheap at 63 cents (no combs or stores probably), and 

 the two extra queens, which we tisually waste, can be found 

 and caged for 25 cents each. 



CARLOAD OF HONEY AT 27 CENTS A POUND. 



A carload of honey sold in Chicago for 27 cents a pound 

 wholesale 1 Suited to make a fellow feel like Virgil's hun- 

 grj- wolf listening to the bleat of lambs. And it was only a 

 matter of 26 years ago. Page 726. 



WHY DIFFERENCE IN GOOD COLONIES ? 



Dr. Miller, having but one question to answer, page 

 727, gives tis an excellent and pretty exhaustive view of the 

 reasons whj- one colony gives surplus and another none — 

 to the puzzlement of the beginner. In my apiary I pretty 

 nearly always assume that a swarm escaped when I didn't 

 see them, if a colony fails to store when other similar ones 

 give surplus. 



R.\INV OCTOBER IN CALIFORNIA. 



Perhaps my nose for superlatives is longer than it 

 ought to be — at any rate I see with interest that California 

 has just had the rainiest October of its history. Not very 

 common to have any rain in October, I take it. Page 729. 



