38 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



Jan. 17, 



great, but It will be considerable. Neither will the average 

 weight be the same one year as the next. In a good year, the 

 weight will average more than in a poor year. Generally you 

 will find that your sections will average a little less than a 

 pound. The idea that you can have sections filled so that 

 each section will weigh just a pound, may as well be given 

 up. I'm rather in favor of having sections a good deal less 

 than a pound, so that customers will never suppose they are 

 getting a full pound of honey in a section. 



2. There's less danger of marring sections when packing 

 with closed sides. 



o. I don't suppose they will. 



4. That I don't know. The Heddon hive was patented, 

 and came prominently before the public a few years ago, but 

 B. Taylor claims to have been using the same sectional cham- 

 bers for many years. If you take all the forms of hives that 

 have been used by moans of sectional brood-chambers added 

 above or below, I suppose they will go so far back that it will 

 be dilJScult to find who first made them public, for the word 

 cfcc or nndlr was in common use in England many years ago. 



Queen Taking' Wing — Probably Worms- 

 Bees. 



-Iieather-Colored 



1. When opening a hive, and the queen takes wing, does 

 she ever come back again '? 



2. What caused so many of my young bees to come out of 

 the hives last spring with undeveloped wings ? Was it be- 

 cause they had felt the cold snap ? 



3. Last summer I had some dead brood in the combs, and 

 opening a cell I found some small worms ?8-inch long, and as 

 thick as a common safety-pin. What kind was it? 



4. How was it that all my young queens reared from pure 

 mothers (Italians) came out leather-colored ? The workers 

 have the three yellow bands. N. N. A. 



Perth Amboy, N. J. 



Answeks. — 1. Yes, but they haven't always done so for 

 me. 



2. More likely worms were in the combs. They gnaw 

 their way among the cells, and the young bees come forth im- 

 perfect, sometimes having hard work to get out at all. It is 

 barely possible that such a thing might occur from insufiicient 

 feeding of the larvas, as some say larvte will be scantily fed 

 when bees are not gatheriug, and have no unsealed honey in 

 the hive. 



3. If they had w6bs in the combs, they were the common 

 wax-worm, not yet of full size. If the dead brood had been 

 there for some time, they may have been a kind of carrion 

 worm that would do good rather than harm. 



4. If the workers have the three yellow bands, no matter 

 about the looks of the queens. Some of the imported Italian 

 queens are quite dark, and a large number prefer leather- 

 colored queens. Queens are not banded like workers, anyhow. 



Uneasy Bees — Sloving and Placing Hives. 



1. I had a colony to swarm, and in two or three mornings 

 the workers from the old stand, or some 40 or 50 of them, 

 came out and flew all around in front and behind the stand, 

 and all under the shelter they were put under, and would 

 alight on the ground in front. They acted as if there was 

 something lost, and they were interested to have it. This 

 went on for three mornings. One would have thought them 

 robbers, but not so. What was wrong? 



2. I want to move my bees about '4 mile. What will be 

 best to move them on V I have 14 colonies now, and I am so 

 afraid to disturb them for fear of losing a colony. When will 

 it be safe to move them? They are under a shelter, and will 

 be moved to another shelter. 



3. How close could they stand and be safe, and the bees 

 and queens not get into the wrong hives? M. W. G. 



Bankston, Ala. 



Answers. — 1. It looks as if they were hunting their 

 queen. 



2. In the North I would wait till sleighing in .lanuary, or 

 later, then haul them on runners. In the South it may be 

 well to wait till well along in the winter— January or later— 

 for the longer they are quiet in their hives, the less likely to 

 go back to the old place. They can be fastened in the hives, 

 with wire-cloth at the entrance so as not to smother them, 

 then hauled on a wagon, set in their new place, and have a 

 board or something of the kind sot up before each hive, so the 

 bees will bump their noses when they come out, and notice 

 where they are. A, It will be well if the old placebo changed as 



much as possible, so that if any bees should go back it will 

 not look like home to them. 



3. How close together they can stand depends a good deal 

 upon surroundings. If there are trees, posts, or something of 

 the kind right in front of the hives, or for that matter close to 

 them in any direction, providing such landmarks are not more 

 than five or ten feet apart, there is little danger of getting 

 them too close. If, however, there are no such landmarks, 

 then it is better to have them six or eight feet apart. 



But if room is rather scarce, here's a way that you can 

 get in four times as many on the same piece of ground with- 

 out danger of having the bees mix : Put your hives in clusters 

 of four, a pair of two as close as they will stand side by side, 

 then a similar pair placed back to back to the first pair. Then 

 put another group of four with a passage of about three feet 

 between the groups, and your bees will not mix any more than 

 if you put a single hive in place of each group. 



A Peculiar Case for Consideration. 



I had 10 colonies of bees last spring in good condition, 

 and one of them later on proved not to be good in the out- 

 come. It cast two fine swarms in April, and the parent col- 

 ony and two young colonies worked splendidly. One day I 

 thought I would extract some honey from these colonies, and 

 on entering the first, I found that all the honey they had was 

 nothing but what I called " foam," and they had a lot of it. 

 Its taste was sour, and there wasn't much honey taste to it. 

 On examining the two young colonies, I found them the same. 

 I cound not account for it when all of the rest of my colonies 

 had good and pure honey — all but these three. Now all three 

 of the colonies are dead, leaving lots of that stuff in the hive. 

 I would be pleased to know what was the matter with my 

 bees. J- M. J. 



Pike, Tex. 



Answer. — This seems a very interesting case, and I con- 

 fess it is something I cannot explain. Perhaps some of our 

 Southern or Texas friends can help us out. It would look as 

 though the bees had been getting honey from some bad source, 

 but if so, why should the trouble be confined to these three 

 colonies? Still, there is nothing remarkable about that, for 

 I've had one or two colonies storing light honey when the rest 

 were storing dark. If the supposition is correct that the 

 source of the honey is at the root of the difficulty, then it 

 looks as if there was some kind of an understanding between 

 the two swarms and the mother colony. There may be more 

 of this than is commonly supposed, that is, bees going back 

 and forth from the new hive to the old. 



The Bee-Escape to Stop Robbing:. 



In this neck of woods (Marion county, Kans.,) we have 

 had a very bad drouth, and an almost entire failure of crops, 

 but we will all pull through, including the bees. I got about 

 50 pounds of honey per colony, spring count, and in- 

 creased from 13 to 22 colonies. I had robber-bees start dur- 

 ing the dry fall. I closed up the hive they were robbing, ex- 

 cept enough to slip a Porter bee-escape into the opening, and 

 the bees became quiet in less than two hours, and staid so. I 

 want to ask if the kink is likely to succeed again, or was it 

 just a pure scratch ? D. J. F. 



Answer. — No, it wasn't an entire scratch, and the plan 

 deserves more thorough trial than it has had. I have often 

 thought that the coarse wire-cloth with three meshes to the 

 inch, that I sometimes have at the entrance in spring or fall, 

 was a great hindrance to robbers. They don't seem to like 

 to go where there isn't clear sailing for their departure in case 

 they felt suddenly called upon to attend to business elsewhere. 

 It's on the same principle that hay or straw at the entrance 

 is a hindrance to robbers. I should expect queen-excluding 

 zinc to work better than the coarse wire-cloth. 



Honey from the Poplar Tree. 



When you are speaking in America of poplar honev, is it 

 a harvest that is produced by the tree — Popuhis pyramidalis ? 



Belgium. 



Answer. — A number of kinds of poplars are in this coun- 

 try. The kind that yields such abundant harvests of honey is 

 lirlodendron tuliplfera. In the Northern States it is called 

 tulip tree or whitewood. So it is not a true poplar or populus 

 at all. 



