1028 



GLEANINGS. IN BEE CULTURE. 



Aug. 1 



are concerned, as the basswood flow will 

 last only about a week longer. Our boom- 

 ing colonies are filling the supers at a great 

 r^te, so we will place on each colony a sec- 

 tion-super having the sections solid full of 

 foundation, placing the empty supers next to 

 the brood-chamber. Fig. 3. 



FINISHING SECTIONS BY FEEDING BACK EX- 

 TRACTED HONEY. 



Perhaps by this time some of the readei's 

 of this article are thinking what a lot of un- 

 finished sections we are going to have. Well, 

 we are going to have a lot of them, and none 

 of them finisJud — at least not until the 

 rush of the honey harvest is over. We do 

 not want our honey finished on these colo- 

 nies, for several reasons. One is that the 

 time of our bees is too valuable just now to 

 allow them to do work that can be done so 

 much better in another way, after the rush 

 of the honey harvest is over, and there is 

 nothing else for the bees to do. Another 

 reason is that these fifty colonies all have 

 old brood-combs, which would spoil the cap- 

 plogs to our sections; and still another rea- 

 son is that the crowding that is necessary 

 for the perfect filling of the sections required 

 for fancy honey would defeat our plans of 

 swarm control, as this is one of the main 

 features of our system. 



You may paste this in your hat for futui'e 

 reference, that a hive full of capped honey 

 is a swarm- breeder. With our system we 

 do not allow very much capped honey in 

 any part of our hives for any length of time 

 This, together with abundant ventilation and 

 plenty of room in the supers in the shape of 

 drawn foundation in sections, always plac- 

 ing the empty supers next to the brood- 

 chamber, will, in our location, most effectu- 

 ally break up the combination of influences 

 that produce swarming, and give us sti'ong- 

 er colonies, and, consequently, a larger yield 

 of surplus honey than can be obtained by 

 any other method of swarm control that has 

 yet come to our notice. 



^ fWe will now consider our fifty feeding col- 

 onies that are going to finish off every one 

 of our sections,' capping them solid to the 

 wood, and maklnw eveiy section a fancy one. 

 We will first go It' one of these feeding colo- 

 nies that at this time contain two queens and 

 two brood-sections, 

 I il and which are pret- 



ty full of young 

 bees, which is just 

 what we want for 

 comb-building. 

 With our hive-lift- 

 er we will swing the 

 hive up ■ from the 

 bottom -board, on 

 which we will place 

 one of our Quinby 

 feeders, and directly 

 on the feeder we 

 will place a brood- 

 section full of new 

 combs freshly 

 drawn from foun- 

 dation that we 



Brood. Queen. 



nuEeN n^ rujD^H 



Brood Queen 



N£WLy BUILT C0MB5 

 TAKEN FROM eXTRAZT- 

 ■ED HONev COLONY. 



Qa/NBV 

 Feeder 



=1 



Figr. 4.— Feeding colony 

 provided with a section of 

 new^combs. 



placed on our extracting-colonies for this 

 purpose, and let the hive back in place, now 

 on the brood-section of new white combs. 

 Fig. 4 



We will next prepare fifty bottom-boards 

 where we want the colonies to stand, and, 

 going to one of the feeding colonies having 

 two queens, we will remove the top brood- 

 section and queen, placingt on one of the 

 prepared bottom-boards; and, going back to 

 the hive from which we took this brood-sec- 

 tion, we will drive the bees down so as not 

 to get the queen, and remove this brood- 

 section also, placing it on the one that we 

 removed first, and put on the cover. 



Having the fifty feeding colonies all treat- 

 ed we will take a sort of inventory, and find 

 that we have just made fifty colonies of bees, 

 and that we have also fifty feeding colonies 

 with one brood section of new white combs 

 from which no brood has yet hatched, and 

 underneath the brood-section is a Quinby 

 feeder which will be fully described under 

 the head of "Feeders " and "Feeding back," 

 in our next article. Each of these feeding 

 colonies has a young vigorous queen that 

 will hold this smajl brood-chamber for brood 

 against any amount of heavy feeding, and 

 will not allow it to become clogged with hon- 

 ey- 

 Having our feeding colonies ready we will 

 next go to our comb-honey colonies and re- 

 move the top supers that are at this, time 

 about ready to cap, 



placing one on each J 



of our feeding col- 

 onies, Fig. 5, with- 

 out driving the bees 

 out or disturbing 

 them in the least, for 

 we do not intend to 

 allow the work in 

 these supers to stop 

 until the sections are 

 finished, which will 

 take only a few days, 

 as they are nearly 

 ready to cap. We 

 shall have to be on 

 our guard and see 

 that no honey is capped on our comb-honey 

 colonies; for if any is capped we shall have 

 to shave the caps off when we put them on 

 our feeding colonies, or else the surface of 

 the comb will be uneven when finished." 



July io.— The basswood-honeyflowis now 

 about over, and with it ends our honey har- 

 vest for 1906, so we will remove the supers 

 from our extracting-colonies, using the es- 

 cape-boards the same as we do in removing 

 our comb-honey supers. With our hive-lifter 

 we will quickly swing the supers up, placing 

 on the brood-chamber an escape-board and 

 let the supers back in place on the escape- 

 board, and without any lifting. Having the 

 • escape-boards under the extracting-supers 

 we will leave them until to-morrow morning, 

 when the bees will all be out of the supers. 

 July 16. — We will with our hive-cart haul 

 the extracting-supers into the extracting- 

 room, which, in our case, is the cellar where 



P'^Jfction taken 



FROM COMB HONEy 

 COLONY 



Brood Section 



CONTAINING N£W 

 C0M85ANO QUEEN 



Quinby f^EE^DLR 



Fig. 5.— Feeding colony 

 after putting on the first 

 super of sections from the 

 comb-honey colony. 



