1907 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



ed the use of honey, saying it would make a 

 candy that would be moist ant) always avail- 

 able to the bees. We made sevei'al lots, as 

 explained, with varying percentages of hon- 

 ey, and felt sure we had struck something 

 good. In the mean time we requested Dr. 

 Lyon to test the same proposition. We also 

 made other lots of candy with dry sugar and 

 water. These several kinds of food we gave 

 to the bees in the cellar. What was the re- 

 sult? The candy that had been subjected 

 to heat containing honey seemed to give any 

 thing but favorable results. For some rea- 

 son it seemed to excite the bees. Why this 

 should be so when honey was a constituent 

 in the Good candy we could not understand 

 unless the cooking had the effect of making 

 the honey into a sort of caramel — a substance 

 that is always harmful to bees. As Dr. Lyon 

 explains, this cooked-honey candy was very 

 sticky, and ran down among the bees — and, 

 such a mess! The bees looked discouraged, 

 and were about ready to thi'ow up the sponge. 



How about the dry candy, using only wa- 

 ter? This worked very nicely. It seemed 

 so brittle and hard that it did not appear 

 that the bees would be able to use any of it; 

 but in its crystal state they would iise it when 

 they would not apparently touch the dry 

 granules of sugar that dropped dow:». on the 

 bottom-board. 



Now, while this hard dry I'ock candy is all 

 right, it is a rather nice trick to make it. If 

 you overcook the mixture of water and su- 

 gar you will spoil it. If you do not cook it 

 enoiigh, the result is just as bad. It should 

 be cooked so that it will "grain" readily 

 when stirred. 



But I suspect that the average l)ee-keeper 

 had better be content to make up the Good 

 candy. In doing this he should not use con- 

 Jectioners\ hut jjoivdcred sugar. The former 

 is apt to contain starch. He should then mix 

 this with the best extracted honey he has, in 

 a warm room, kneading it until he has a 

 lump of hard stiff dough. He should allow 

 this to stand three or four days. In all prob- 

 ability the dough will begin to "run" and 

 become sticky. He can overcome this by 

 mixing in a little more powdered sugar, 

 kneading it again until he has a nice stiff 

 ball, which will hold its stability. This may 

 now be given to the bees, in suitable-sized 

 lumps on top of the frames. 



For outdoor colonies the candy should of 

 course be protected with packing material, 

 and the whole covered with a super or deep 

 cover. Building-paper will answer excel- 

 lently for the purpose if put over the super. 



I might state that Dr. Lyon and ourselves, 

 in testing the value of this honey-and-sugar 

 candy that had been cooked, and then made 

 into bricks, sacrificed something like twenty 

 colonies of bees. He killed something like 

 ten, and we lost an equal number. How 

 many more we actually injured in the cellar, 

 not so fed, we can not say. While only a 

 few colonies were given this hard honey can- 

 dy, yet the excitement caused among those 

 few affected more or less all the others not 

 supplied with this food. — Ed.] 



VENTILATING OUR BEE-CELLARS. 



Too Much and Too Little; how Not to 

 Ventilate. 



BY E. W. ALEXANDER. 



There are but few things connected with 

 the wintering of our bees that elicit such a 

 difference of opinion as the ventilating of our 

 bee-cellars. While it is true that bees have 

 been and are frequently wintered in cellars 

 that have little or no ventilation, it is also 

 true that, in these, we usually find the combs 

 badly molded, honey thin and watery, and 

 the bees somewhat aft'ected with dysentery, 

 and far from a healthy condition when taken 

 out. Certainly it is contrary to natural law 

 to confine our bees under ground five months 

 or more, compelling them to breathe the same 

 air over and over thousands of times, and 

 then expect them to remain in a healthy con- 

 dition so as to stand the ever changeable 

 weather of our spring season. 



In order to have my ideas well understood 

 on this ventilating subject, Figs. 1 and 2 

 show the building we made over our bee-cel- 

 lar last fall. In constructing this building 

 we had several objects in view. First, and 

 one of the most important, was to give the 

 cellar p^orier ventilatio7i; next, to give us a 

 large room above to do our extracting in, 

 and store our surplus hives of extracting- 

 combs and many other things connected with 

 the business. Then we wanted a tank-room 

 where we could have our honey-tanks so ar- 

 ranged that, in a moment, we could turn the 

 honey directly from the extractor into either 

 tank; then we wanted a shop where we could 

 make hives and do all kinds of odd jobs, such 

 as making beeswax into comb foundation, 

 grafting larv;^ for queen-cells, which should 

 always l)e done in a warm room, and, lastly, 

 plenty of room to store a large crop of hon- 

 ey in until sold. 



First, I will describe the building, which is 

 24 feet wide and 56 long. The longest way 

 is north and south. The cellar occupies 24 

 X40 feet of the ground floor at the north end; 

 then the tank- room occupies 16x34 feet of 

 the south end, and its floor is on the same 

 level with the cellar Hoor. This room has 

 four doors in it — one wide door opening in- 

 to the south end of the cellar; also one wide 

 outside door in the south end of the building 

 where we roll out the barrels of honey into 

 the wagon when we ship. Then we have a 

 door on each side of this room, which comes 

 very handy to carry bees in and out of the 

 cellar from the lower part of the bee-yard by 

 putting screens on these two doors; and by 

 leaving them open we get a fine current of 

 air through the tank-room, which has much 

 to do with ripening and thickening the hon- 

 ey. The cellar also has an outside door at 

 the northeast corner, where the greater num- 

 ber of colonies are carried in and out. The 

 shop part is on the upper floor, which is lev- 

 el with the floor of the extracting-room, and 

 is 16X24 feet. 



This extracting-room or store-room is 24X 

 40 feet; and directly over the cellar in the 



