1907 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



843 



scavenger of the streets. Shall we then be 

 in haste to condemn a beautiful plant, beau- 

 tiful if it were not so common'.' 



A SEASON'S WORK WITH SECTIONAL 

 HIVES. 



Swarm Control and Comb-honey Produc- 

 tion; How to Find Queens Without 

 Handling Frames; the Two-queen 

 System of Honey- production. 



BY J. E. HAND. 



[The following article is of exceptional interest, for 

 the reason that it touches on two somewhat debata- 

 ble questions, namely, the feasibility of finding and 

 catching a queen without touching a brood-frame, 

 and working the two-queen system — that is, two 

 queens in one hive. 



It was R. L. Taylor who, some ten or twelve years 

 ago, at one of our bee conventions stated that he 

 could find and catch a queen without handling a 

 frame; for he was then using, as he is now, a Heddon 

 divisible-brood-chamber hive. His method, as we 

 now recall it, was somewhat similar to that described 

 by Mr. Hand. Mr. Heddon followed a different plan; 

 getting the queen by shaking a section until the bees 

 and queen fell out on the ground; but this was prac- 

 ticable only with black bees. In Europe the straw- 

 skep bee-keepers have for years had various plans of 

 getting their queens. We have no divisible-brood- 

 chamber hives in our apiary just now or we would 

 try Mr. Hand's method; but our Mr. W. K. Morrison, 

 who has worked these hives for years, says the meth- 

 od is perfectly feasible, for he has worked it himself. 

 In the Amirican Bee Journal for May 30. J. E. Cham- 

 bers has a scheme for trapping the queen without 

 handling a frame. He is a user of a sectional hive. 



Modern bee culture is progressing more and more 

 into handling frames less and hives more, whether 

 Langstroth in pattern or not; but it has been insisted 

 on by the frame-handlers that queens could not be 

 found and caught without pulling out the combs, 

 and that meant taking frame after frame until the 

 queen was located. 



We are glad to bring this subject before our read- 

 ers, and trust that, if any of them have practiced the 

 Hand, Taylor, or Chambers method, they will let us 

 hear from them as to how it works, whether a failure 

 or success. 



The other subject, the two-queen system, is receiv- 

 ing more and more prominence; and as so many have 

 made a success of it, some conservatives, as well as 

 the enthusiasts, may do well to give this their careful 

 consideration. By the plan that Mr. Hand here 

 works, he is not only able to produce a crop of honey 

 in a poor locality, but manage a poultry-farm of some 

 600 or 700 chickens; for, be it said, poultry is his prin- 

 cipal business. 



It will be noticed that he does not raise any ques- 

 tion as to the success of any of the plans here advo- 

 cated in the hands of others. But as he is able to 

 make these short cuts, thereby making honey and 

 money when some of the rest of us fall down, per- 

 haps we would do well to sit at his feet, for he is a 

 bee-keeper of many years' experience; and, like Ga- 

 maliel of old, he is willing to tell what he knows. Mr. 

 Hand writes:] 



We are now coming to the interesting pai't 

 of our subject. We will, from this on, dem- 

 onstrate by actual work in the apiary the ar- 

 guments that we have advanced in our two 

 former articles. Our apiary contains 152 col- 

 onies, 80 of which were wintered on their 

 summer stands in winter cases, with sawdust 

 packing. The rest. 73 colonies, were winter- 

 ed in the cellar under our dwellinghouse. 

 This is a most perfect wintering-cellar; how- 

 ever, last winter, for the first time, the mice 

 worried the bees in the cellar, causing many 

 to leave the hives and become lost. Our 

 hives were wintered without bottom-boards. 



Hereafter, when wintering our bees in the 

 cellar, our hives will be mouse-proof. 



It is now May 10. and up to this time we 

 have not loosened a cover to any of our 

 hives since last September. Here is some- 

 thing worth remembering: Don't loosen the 

 covers to your hives in early spring. It 

 causes a great deal of heat to escape from 

 the cluster that is so much needed at this 

 time. Satisfy your curiosity by tipping the 

 hive up on end and looking between the 

 combs from the bottom. As the weather at 

 this time is tine, and the bees are pouring 

 into the hives laden with pollen of many 

 hues, we are assured that they are breeding 

 up: so we will now remove the winter-cases 

 from the 80 colonies that were wintered on 

 the summer stands. 



The sawdust that was used for winter pack- 

 ing will serve an excellent purpose in keep- 

 ing down the grass in front of the hives. 

 This is important, for we must not allow a 

 blade of grass or a weed to grow in front of 

 our hives to hinder the flight of our bees. 

 Having our winter cases removed and piled 

 up in a row along the side of the apiary, we 

 will now clip our queens. 



While we do not expect to have any swarms 

 issue, yet somehow a habit of 30 years' stand- 

 ing is hard to break; and as we wish to make 

 an examination of the condition of every one 

 of our colonies at this time, it is but little 

 more trouble to clip our queens so that we 

 can tell their age when we come to supersede 

 them; for we do not aim to keep any queen 

 longer than two seasons, and we will here- 

 after winter a queen only once, superseding 

 all our queens each season just before the 

 honey harvest. This practice will insure a 

 vigorous queen in every colony, and will 

 practically do away with tinkering up weak 

 colonies in the spring. Every thing hinges 

 on the queen. A vigorous young queen will 

 keep laying late in the season, and will give 

 you a strong force of young bees to go into 

 winter quarters, which means a strong colo- 

 ny next spring, providing the apiarist does 

 his part in providing ample protection for 

 the colony during winter. Since we have 

 adopted this plan with our poultry, our prof- 

 its in egg-production have been greatly in- 

 creased, and also the mortality in our flocks 

 has been greatly lessened. We have no more 

 use for an aged queen than for a moulting 

 hen. 



We believe that this matter of allowing the 

 bees to supersede aged queens in the spring 

 is a great loss to the honey-producer, and 

 that, by requeening each year, it is possible 

 to secure an approximate yield per colony 

 for each individual colony in the apiary, in- 

 stead of having a few colonies store our sur- 

 plus, and the rest do nothing, as is too often 

 the case. Perfect swarm control is not to be 

 accomplished by a single stroke, but is the 

 result of a careful removal of a combination 

 of natural influences that lead up to swarm- 

 ing. Not the least of these is an aged queen, 

 therefore requeening each year previous to 

 the main honey-flow is a great aid to perfect 

 swarm control. 



