Vol XXXV. 



FEB. 15, 1907. 



No. 4. 





■^M^ll^lJlEiR?:' 



At San Antonio some held that wax- 

 worms could not be started without pollen. 

 When I had more black blood than now, I 

 saw many cases of worms started in sec- 

 tions, on the edge of the new comb, where, 

 of coui'se, there was no chance for pollen. 



Stings are said to be worse when buck- 

 wheat is yielding, and it is explained by 

 saying that analysis shows twice as much 

 formic acid in buckwheat honey as in clover. 

 But please remember, dear friends, that late 

 investigations have shown that the poison of 

 the sting is something separate from formic 

 acid. 



Swiss bee-keepei's, with their 36 experi- 

 ment stations, are getting ahead of us. They 

 have been experimenting at mailing eggs. 

 Of 76 sendings, 22 were failures. From the 

 other 54 sendings, 305 queens resulted, 80 

 per cent of which mated and laid. Virgins 

 are sent to the stations to be fertilized, and 

 then returned. 



Geo. Shiber wants me to explain why 1 

 did not have success caging queens to pre- 

 vent swarming, as mentioned in "Forty 

 Years among the Bees," p. 179. He proba- 

 bly has in mind that on p. 162 I report uni- 

 form success with the Doolittle plan of cag- 

 ing a queen ten days and cutting out cells. 

 But the Doolittle plan did not pre cent swarm- 

 ing — it was only the treatment of a colony 

 after it had swarmed. It allowed the colony 

 to swarm and then kept the whole force to- 

 gether without swarming again. But caging 



the queen ten days or more when they had 

 not swarmed did not prevent swarming, 

 whether they had started cells or not. 



The kepokt of the National shows 9 men 

 having 1000 or more colonies each; a total of 

 12,100, averaging 1344 They are: In Cali- 

 fornia, J. H. Flory, 1600; J. F. Mclntyre, 

 1000; M. H. Mendelson, 1700; L. E. Mercer, 

 1500; R. M. Spencer, 1200; in Colorado, M. 

 A. Gill, 1000; Bert Hopper, 1500; in New 

 York, C. B. Howard, 1000; in Texas, Willie 

 Atchley, 1600. A little remarkable that not 

 one has an odd number, all having even hun- 

 dreds. [There are some names in this list 

 that are not generally known to the ovitside 

 bee-keeping world. They are probably of 

 the kind who "keep still and saw wood," 

 but not of the kind who would not be willing 

 to impart all they know. For example, E. W. 

 Alexander was for many years unknown to 

 bee-journal readers; yet subsequent events 

 have shown that no man was ever more will- 

 ing to draw from his extended and varied 

 experience and place the facts before the 

 reading public — Ed.] 



Editor Hutchinson thinks bottom start- 

 ers superfluous. The bottom starter being 

 my baby, I may be supposed to be partial to 

 it, but I think I wouldn't be to the extra 

 trouble of using it if I could without it pro- 

 duce crop after crop of sections such that no 

 man could tell "which was the top and which 

 was the bottom of the sections," as he says 

 thousands of bee-keepers have done. I've 

 been advising all to use bottom starters, but 

 I'd really like to know if Bro. Hkitchinson is 

 right in saying that " with most bee-keepers 

 it would be a wholly superfluous operation." 

 [Bro. Hutchinson is usually right; but in 

 this we can not help feeling that he is mis- 

 taken. If he will consult the commission 

 men and honey-merchants, and all others 

 who receive consignments of comb honey, 

 we think he will find their universal verdict, 

 where they know any thing about how the 



