1903 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



295 



all in the dense shade of tropical trees. 

 His bees are all a fine strain of Italians. 

 Just let me say something to the readers of 

 Gi-KANINGS rig-ht here. 



Ernest has been pretty thoroughly criti- 

 cised, not onljf^ in Gleanings, but in other 

 bee journals, for suggesting that our red- 

 clover queen was worth $200. Now, mind 

 you. I am not going to advertise our queens 

 this time. Friend W. got his best queen of 

 our veteran friend Doolittle. He paid $10 

 for her, and then paid for a nucleus besides 

 to ship her in, so as to have her come in 

 good order ready for breeding. He has 

 stocked the whole apiary I saw, with queens 

 from this Doolittle queen. The hives are 

 mostl}' two- story, and some of them three- 

 story. The bees are nicely marked, gentle 

 to handle, and good workers. 



"Friend Woodward, how much do you 

 suppose that Doolittle queen has been 

 worth to you — that is, how much money has 

 this apiary given you because of the fact 

 that ever}' queen is of that Doolittle strain 

 instead of being of the hit-and-miss kind 

 which most of the Cuban bee keepers get 

 along with? Haven't you actually saved 

 $200, the price Ernest put on our choice 

 queen? " 



" Whj', Mr. Root, that Doolittle queen 

 has been vioxXh Jive hundred dollars to me, 

 counting the queens I have reared from her 

 that have been used to stock others of our 

 apnaries; and 1 am testing some of her 

 daughters with the view of using them for 

 breeders when she is gone."*'" 



Now, friend Woodward may have been a 

 little extravagant in the above; but I will 

 jeave it to our veterans in bee culture — is it 

 not possible that a bee-keeper can be bene- 

 fited to the extent of hundreds of dollars by 

 starting business with a queen that is supe- 

 rior as a breeder? 



Mr. Woodward has another trick in ex- 

 tracting that may not be new, and. in fact, 

 I think I have heard of it before. We will 

 suppose you have a two-story hive and a 

 strong colony of bees, and the combs are 

 nearl}' ready to extract — that is, the bees 

 have begun capping some of them in the 

 center. Now, instead of extracting these 

 combs and putting empt}' ones in their 

 place, suppose you lift this upper story up 

 and put a storj' of empty combs right under 

 it; while the bees are finishing the capping 

 of the top story, they will have the second 

 one pretty well filled with raw honey; then 

 when the top storj' is ready to extract, lift 

 up the second, and put another story of 

 empty combs under it as before. 



Friend W. uses ten-frame Dovetailed 



♦After the above was dictated. Ernest received the 

 following from friend Woodward. It is a little bit of a 

 joke on your humble servant, but it .sometimes does 

 us good to get a glimpse of the way others see us. 



Mb. E. R. Root:— Your fathwr did make me a call (which 

 which was all too shorti. but I could not pcrsuait" him to 

 stay loneer. 1 saw very soon that he was a lover of the hon- 

 ey-bee, for he was in my apiary about all the time he was at 

 my home, and il seemed to me he was a man who was always 

 in a hurry. He would walk from one hive to another like 

 lightninK. and would take in the whole thing at a glance. I 

 hope to see him again soon. C. E. Woodward. 



Gaanabana, Cnl>a, March 6. 



hives containing Hoffm.an frames. He says 

 that, where an apiary is often intrusted to 

 a man who is not very much experienced, 

 he very much prefers Hoffman frames, for 

 then one can not make bad spacing. Now, 

 Moe, Hochstein. Howe, and perhaps all the 

 bee-men west of Havana, will not have a 

 Hoffman frame on the premises. What are 

 you going to do about it? Mr. Woodward 

 is certainly successful; his apiaries are 

 neat and tidy; he gets the honey, and his 

 bees are so handled that they are not cross 

 to work with. His combs are all made of 

 full sheets of foundation on wired frames. 

 His wife had been making foundation, with 

 the help of a Cuban boy, the day I arrived. 



By the way, friend W. has a model home. 

 It is more after the fashion of the Florida 

 buildings. His library and sleeping-rooms 

 are upstairs; and, while I think of it, I be- 

 lieve very good authority has decided that, 

 in the exceedingly damp climate of Cuba, 

 an upstairs sleeping-room is to be prefer- 

 red. The air is so damp most nights — that 

 is, there are such heavy dews — that, if you 

 should leave a sheet on the clothes-line over 

 night, in the morning it would be almost as 

 wet as if it had been dipped in water. 



Just one more thing about friend Wood- 

 ward's home. Before we got into the house 

 a pet parrot named Catara Real hurried 

 out of the house to meet him with the most 

 endearing expressions of love. I just had 

 to have a good big laugh to see the parrot 

 make such an ado at the sight of her own- 

 er. As she talked Spanish I could not tell 

 what she said; but she climbed up his 

 trowsers leg, got on his shoulder, rubbed 

 her head against his face and neck, and 

 nibbled his ears with her bill, and talked 

 and talked and talked. She would never 

 bite him too hard; but if anybody else 

 touched her, or tried to, she would go into a 

 fury right away. When he was out in the 

 apiary among the bees, or when he was at- 

 tending to his correspondence, she remained 

 perched on his shoulder, and kept calling 

 him loving names. At night, when it was 

 bedtime, he put her up into a perch over- 

 head; but she kept on talking to herself, 

 and several times in the night I heard her 

 familiar voice. You see, parrots in Cuba 

 are almost in their native home. They 

 would go into the tops of the tallest trees if 

 their wings were not clipped. 



Friend Woodward has a hive on scales, 

 such as I pictured in the ABC book; and 

 he watches these scales as a gardener 

 watches the thennometer or barometer. 

 When I was there, the hive on the scales 

 was showing a yield of three or four pounds 

 a day. If I ain correct, he said he had se- 

 cured as much as 300 lbs. of comb honey 

 from one hive in one season. But a large 

 3'ield of comb honey almost always means 

 reducing the colony in strength until it is 

 almost ruined; whereas, when the colony 

 is run for extracted honej' the queen has 

 room to keep right on la3'ing and raising 

 brood. Several hives gave over 500 lbs. of 

 extracted honey in a season. As a rule, 



