THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



623 



A great disadvantage in tlie old 

 Langstroth liive was, the shallow % 

 inch air-chamber over the top of the 

 frames, allowing a circulation of air 

 over the tops of the frames. Bees 

 wintered better in box hives, and we 

 ought to make movaVile frame hives 

 resemble their good features as far as 

 possible. In the box hive every comb 

 makes a division-board, tightly fitting 

 at the sides and top, so as to allow no 

 circulation of air anmnd or over the 

 liees. To a question, asking if Mr. 

 Hoffman left the enameled cloth on 

 during winters, he answered that he 

 did. He wintered in a very peculiar 

 manner in a depository so warm that 

 the bees hung out over the outside of 

 the hive all the time. 



He said, if Prof. Ilasbrouck had 

 asked him the same question he put 

 to Mr. Cook, he would have answered, 

 uiKjuestionably he had seen very 



freat benefit from spreading the 

 rood. But it must be done with 

 treat care. If the bee-keeper could 

 now certainly just when he would 

 need the bees, there would be little 

 difficulty by manipulating the brood 

 to have "jus't what he wanted on time. 

 If one could see the pile of waxed 

 barrels which he had prepared for 

 buckwheat and fall honey, which 

 were still empty, he would have some 

 idea of the uncertainties of bee-keep- 

 ing. He said honey ought to be kept 

 in frames to feed in the spring. The 

 ■capping should be broken, and then 

 the frames should be placed between 

 the brood. 



There had been much talk about 

 cheap food for feeding bees. Bee- 

 keepers ought to step on the idea of 

 feeding glucose. The public would 

 get the impression that it was fed to 

 make honey. A good thing about it 

 was, that it does not pay to feed glu- 

 cose. It does not pay to feed honey 

 back, and he was glad it did not. He 

 next referred to the position of Mr. 

 (look's paper on natural swarming. 

 He said the box hive was years in ad- 

 vance of natural swarming, and if he 

 used the box hive, lie would not allow 

 Ills bees to swarm naturally. Much 

 was said about the extra eiiero;y of 

 natural swarms. This reason of this 

 was. that they had nothing else to do 

 but to store honey. If you accept the 

 motto, "give every liive a good prolific 

 queen," you kill natural swarming. 



To a question by Mrs. Thomas, he 

 said, that honey just gathered con- 

 tained 70 per cent, of water, and that if 

 this was evaporated artificially, it was 

 exactly the same as honey evaporated 

 by the" bees in the hive, while the bees 

 w'ere saved much labor. That Mrs. 

 Cotton's feed undergoes no change in 

 the process of its being stored by the 

 bees. If the bees gather molasses, 

 they store molasses. If glucose, they 

 store glucose. It seemed a sad thing 

 to him. when the editor of a bee paper 

 of considerable influence said that by 

 feeding glucose you olitain honey — not 

 something like honey— it was honey." 

 Being asked to explain further 

 aViout his experience in the artificial 

 evaporation of honey, he said tliat 

 when Mr. Quinby first heard of cen- 

 trifugal force applied to honey combs, 

 he improvised an extractor imme- 



diately, from parts of a fanning mill. 

 At first they had practiced extracting 

 from a small hive, and then letting it 

 stand till it was again filled, and the 

 honey capped. They next tried a 

 large hive with many combs, allowing 

 the bees to spread out the honey, over 

 a large surface, with but little in a 

 cell. They found that in that way 

 they obtained a decided increase of 

 honey. They next concluded that all 

 the bees did "to ripen the honey, was 

 to evaporate the water which they 

 noticed would be left hanging to th"e 

 cover of the hives in large drops. 

 The next step was to prepare an ar- 

 rangement by which the honey taken 

 from the hive as soon as gathered 

 could be spread out to the air, while 

 it was raised to a high temperature 

 by an oil stove, so that the bees would 

 be saved the great labor which was 

 wearing them out rapidly. He found 

 that he could thus secure a much 

 greater quantity of honey. His ma- 

 chine was much in construction like 

 the evaporators of maple syrup. He 

 keeps the water under it at 7.5^. He 

 runs it twice over the machine. He 

 has honey thus evaporated which has 

 been kept 2 years without candying. 



Dr. Phin, editor of the Journal of 

 Microscopy, asked in what way honey 

 evaporated this way was less artificial 

 than maple syrup evaporated in an 

 evaporating pan 'i* Mr. Root replied, 

 that this honey was in no respect dif- 

 ferent from that ripened in the hive 

 by the bees. Prof. Cook had said 

 that the bees add an acid in ripening 

 the honey, but had finally admitted 

 that ripening was only a process of 

 evaporation of the water contained 

 in the honey. Although he had great 

 respect for the opinion of Dadant & 

 Son, yet he l)elieved that his honey 

 evaporated by his plan was not inferior 

 to any produced by their system. 



Mr. Cook asked how he would pre- 

 vent swarming V He answered that 

 there was no trouble in preventing 

 natural swarms, when bees were run 

 for extracted honey. When taking 

 box honey, his aim is to have all the 

 increase of bees he can in the hives 

 without an increase of colonies, and 

 prevent the desire for swarming. He 

 accomplishes this by removing a card 

 of brood and supplying its place with 

 empty comb or foundation. A good 

 prolific queen, one not already ex- 

 hausted by laying, is a preventive of 

 swarming. jS^o system of practice in 

 taking box- honey" will prevent swarm- 

 ing. He was glad that Mr. Cook ad- 

 vised allowing natural swarming at 

 first to obtain queen-cells. 



Mrs. Thomas, in speaking of the 

 paper, said she never put on surplus 

 boxes till the hive was filled with 

 honey. Swarming comes to bees as 

 blossoms to flowers. In contracting 

 brood-nest in tlie spring, she used 

 division-lioards of card-boards, cut by 

 machinery to fit the inside of the hive 

 closely. 



Mr. 'Hutchinson said tliat allowance 

 must be made in adopting the prac- 

 tice of others, for the difi'erence of 

 locality, which was illustrated by the 

 fact that the canal near Mr. "Root 

 opened May 10, while the one near 

 himself opened on March 20. 



The next paper was then read by 

 the Secretary, on 



HANDLING BEES. 



This 'term is significant of the dif- 

 ference between the old bee-keeping 

 and the new. formerly there was no 

 such thing as liandling bees while 

 alive, except to set them over the 

 brimstone pit, but with the introduc- 

 tion of movable combs, bees have 

 been •' handled " and " handled," and 

 often handled to-death. I think I am 

 safe in saying that " handling bees " 

 is, in itself, always a detriment to 

 them— more or less— and that a hive 

 of bees should never be opened unless 

 there be a positive necessity either to 

 learn' its condition, or to perform 

 some operation which, in its effect, 

 will benefit them more than the 

 handling will do them injury, or to 

 take away the surplus for which they 

 are kept." Moreover, handling bees 

 takes time and labor, and the bee- 

 keeper must economize these by 

 spending none which necessity does 

 not demand. 



From considerations of this econ- 

 omy of labor, if for no other reason, I 

 woiild prefer natural swarming to any 

 system of artificial increase. I am 

 not a believer with Mr. House, in 

 his part of " Alley's Handy Book," 

 that a bee-keeper must be able to tell 

 the condition of every colony from 

 the outside appearance. I must con- 

 fess that after a pretty extensive ex- 

 perience, my opinion passed in that 

 way would be about as valuable as my 

 estimate of the quantity of money in 

 a trunk, by looking at the cover. 



While I believe a man must look 

 inside to see how it is with a colony, 

 yet any man who is cut out for a bee- 

 keeper must be able to tell by a rapid 

 examination in the spring, accurately 

 the condition of every colony then, 

 and what help each needs, and after- 

 wards by means of his record he must 

 be able to judge just when and what 

 kind of attention each colony will 

 again need, and, except for that, I 

 consider it necessary for their great- 

 est prosperity, that they be left abso- 

 lutely alone. It is a fo'rtunate era for 

 the bees of a beginner, when he gets 

 so many colonies, that lie is not able 

 " to go through them " every few days 

 for some imaginary purpose. 



Admitting that it is necessary that 

 a colony of bees shoidd be over-hauled 

 sometimes, let us consider the whole- 

 some restrictions and limitations of 

 this operation. First, I should say 

 that bees ought not to be opened in 

 cold and disagreeable weather. I am 

 convinced that disturbance at such 

 times, is one cause of that most an- 

 noying of accidents to a colony, the 

 balling and killing of a queen by her 

 own subjects. Several years ago a 

 gentleman came to me one cold dis- 

 agreeable day in April to get me to go 

 and look at llis bees, which he wanted 

 to sell. He opened seven hives to 

 show them. In just a week we had 

 about agreed on the price, and I went 

 to look them over to see that they 

 were yet all right. Six out of the 

 seven colonies liad queen-cells which 

 they had just begun to cap, showing 

 that the queen had been killed on the 



