THE AMERICAJSt BEE JOURNAL. 



239 



and as near pure as possible, to breed 

 queens from ; taking my second best 

 for drones, and preventing any others 

 from rearing drones by removing all 

 droni? combs, or cutting the drones' 

 heads off, just before they are ready 

 to hatch ; and I liave a strain of bees 

 now that winter well, and store as 

 large an average as any in this coun- 

 try. My average for 1882, was 82 

 pounds per colony, the yard through, 

 although my best went 12U to 140 per 

 hive. One-third of my surplus was 

 in small sections, weighing from 1 to 

 \}4 find 2 pounds each. Honey put up 

 in such packages sells readily, when 

 compared with the surplus boxes that 

 were formerly used. 



A word to those who are thinking 

 of investing in bees will be in order 

 now ; and it will be the old adage used 

 so often : " Make haste slowly." By 

 this I mean, do not invest in more 

 than two or three colonies at first, for 

 they will mnlLiply faster than you will 

 learn to handle them ; and if not prop- 

 erly cared for, your profits will come 

 out on the debtor side. Beginners 

 must have a little adaptation to their 

 work, or they will fail to reach the 

 financial goal ; for bee-keeping now, 

 and in the future, is not as it was 

 when "father kept bees." It has 

 been reduced to a science, and will be 

 more scientific in time to come ; only 

 those that keep pace with the im- 



Erovement, and have a liking for the 

 usiness, will be successful — and bee- 

 keeping is becoming a specialty with 

 hundreds of scientific bee-keepers. It 

 should be a separate occupation, for 

 the simple reason that any one posted 

 In the improvements up to the pres- 

 ent, can produce honey cheaper than 

 those who have only a colony or two 

 out back of the smoke-house, which 

 are looked after only in swarming- 

 time, or time to rob, by killing them. 

 Let the same person just raise one 

 more hog, and when fattened and sold, 

 it will buy more honey from any prac- 

 tical apiarist than he would get from 

 his two or three colonies, with less 

 trouble or money invested. Indiffer- 

 ent or careless bee-keepers allow the 

 bee-moth to accumulate, and by so 

 doing, make it more labor for the suc- 

 cessful bee-keeper to rear good busi- 

 ness bees, upon which lie depends for 

 the bread and butter for his family 

 and himself. 



Again, where a man has a love for 

 the business of handling bees, it is a 

 very remunerative employment, and 

 will give him valuable lessons of his 

 duty toward his fellow-man ; also 

 teaching him that great results often 

 have small beginnings. For instance ; 

 each head of clover contains about 60 

 distinct llovver tubes, each of which 

 must, therefore, have a portion of 

 sugar not e.xceeding the one-hun- 

 dredth part of a graiu. The proboscis 

 of the bee must consequently be in- 

 serted into 500 clover tubes before 

 one grain of sugar can be obtained. 

 There are 7,000 grains in a poimd, so 

 that for every pound of sugar pro- 

 cured in this way, 3.500,000 flower 

 tubes must be emptied. Honey, how- 

 ever, contains three-fourths of its 

 weight of dry sugar, so that every 

 pound of honey is equivalent to more 



than 2,500,000 clover tubes sucked by 

 bees. Yet how few people realize, or 

 even have one thought of the amount 

 of labor performed by the industrious 

 honey-bee, in storing a hundred 

 pounds of surplus honey. Nor do 

 they think how rapidly they increase, 

 for it is known that the queen has de- 

 posited as many as three to four thou- 

 sand eggs in 24 ^ours ; and in 21 days 

 they all emerge from their cells per- 

 fect bees, there being about 35,000 to 

 40,000 workers in a good colony. It 

 would only take a few days to rear a 

 full colony if they did not work them- 

 selves to death ; but the entire colony 

 becomes new, every two to three 

 months during the working season, 

 owing to the amount of honey obtained 

 and distance traveled in gathering it. 

 Some people may think this a wild 

 assertion, yet after 14 years' experi- 

 ence, I know what I speak ; and to 

 any one that does not believe it, I 

 would say, try it yourself, as I have. 

 By getting an Italian queen, and in- 

 troducing her into a black colony, in 

 three months they will not find a sin- 

 gle black bee in the hive if the queen 

 IS a pure Italian ; and it is a conceded 

 fact that the Italians are the best, all 

 things considered, for general use, 

 although wehave in the LJnited States 

 six different strains of bees — the com- 

 mon black, Italian, Holy Land, Syr- 

 ians, Albinos and German — all hav- 

 ing their friends, although the Holy 

 Land and Syrians are very cross, 

 while the Albinos are the most quiet 

 in handling, and also slower in honey 

 gathering, often not storing enough 

 for their own use ; while it is claimed 

 that one cross of either two of these 

 kinds improves them, with the possi- 

 ble exception of Italians, that are sus- 

 ceptible of weeding out a little in 

 order to secure good honey gatherers. 



I think for the specialist the Langs- 

 trotli hives are the best, because they 

 are capable of tiering up, by putting 

 one above the other in time of a large 

 honey flow, and when the apiarist is 

 taxed to his utmost to give the bees 

 room to prevent swarming, and 

 thereby secure tlie best results in sur- 

 plus honey. They are also well 

 adapted to the storing of comb and 

 extracted honey ; and being in gen- 

 eral use, all of the supply dealers 

 have hives, frames and sections, in 

 the flat, ready to put together, singly 

 or in any amount wanted ; and spec- 

 ialists are adopting the same hive, in 

 order that they can order, on short 

 notice, surplus sections, and have 

 them fit without trouble. I have used 

 the original American hive, patented 

 by II. A. King & Co., of New York 

 city ; the hive being isy square by 21 

 inches high, outside measurement, 

 with nine movable frames in them; 

 the top part of the frame being 1?^^ 

 inches wide, forming a complete floor 

 or tlie top to the hive, when all of the 

 frames are in, and each frame has a 

 slot % by 2 inches tlirough them, for 

 the bees to pass through into the sur- 

 plus boxes above, and it is my opin- 

 ion, that for farmers or those who 

 want only a few colonies, that the 

 American is the best hive they could 

 use ; but would advise any one who 

 intends to invest in bees, to visit a 



well-established apiary and look at 

 the different hives in use, and there 

 he could learn more in one day, in a 

 practical way, than he would" learn 

 from books in a month. Our most 

 practicable apiarists advocate the ne- 

 cessity of students spending one sea- 

 son in the employ of a specialist, 

 thereby learning "tlie trade, so to 

 speak, at the end of which time they 

 are competent to take charge of an 

 apiary of 80 to 100 colonies, with rea- 

 sonable certainty of making a success 

 of it ; and I can speak for all bee- 

 keepers, and say that, as a class, they 

 are always willing to give advice to 

 beginners, or if visited, will show 

 them the advantages of the different 

 hives that they may have in use. It 

 will repay any one tor such a visit, to 

 see the "different kinds of bees, for 

 almost all bee-keepers have two or 

 more strains, and they are all looking 

 for the coming bee, the Apis-Ameri- 

 cana. 

 Farmington, Kansas. 



For tlie American Bee JoumaL 



ftueen Rearing.Raspberry Honey, etc 



p. p. N. E. PBLISSIEE. 



I was surprised, on reading an arti- 

 cle by W. C. Jennison, on page 119. 

 He must use hard lumber to make 

 his frames. Let him use soft pine 

 and he will find that by pulling a little 

 on the fine wire, or passing a piece of 

 iron or hard wood over it, it will be 

 imbeded sufficiently deep, so as not to 

 interfere with the scraping of wax or 

 propolis. 



As for queen-cells, if he lets his 

 bees swarm naturally, he does not 

 need to cut queen-cells over wires, and 

 thereby spoil his well-built worker- 

 combs ; he has simply to destroy those 

 that he does not wish to hatch. If 

 he wants to rear queens, tlie best way 

 is to have frames without wires, fasten 

 one or two bars (according to depth of 

 frame) inside of the frame, parallel 

 with the top and bottom bars ; fasten 

 a strip of foundation to each of these 

 bars, and set one or two of these 

 frames in the centre of the hive con- 

 taining the best queen. In less than 

 24 hours, the comb foundation will be 

 drawn out and every cell will contain 

 an egg. Every bee-keeper knows 

 how to have the queen-cells started, 

 and he will have no difliculty in cut- 

 ting them out large enough so that 

 they can be simply fastened on 

 another frame with a common pin, 

 which will save the mutilating of 

 combs. 



The statement that Mr. Jennison 

 clipped from the ..4?»eri!can Cultivator 

 is wrong, so far as red raspberries are 

 concerned. The flowers of red rasp- 

 berries yield whiter, nicer and better- 

 flavored honey, and in larger quanti- 

 ties than even the much-praised white 

 clover. 



The bees are good judges of honey ; 

 they will invariably gather from the 

 bloom that vields the richest nectar, 

 even if the secretion is not .so great as 

 in other bloom. Here, the white 

 clover is of spontaneous growth ; it 

 may be seen everywhere ; if a fire 



