264 



THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 



deavor to succeed, will be conferring 

 a benefit on the bee-keeping public. 

 What you say in reference to placing 

 our honey in the hands of men who 

 adulterate, cannot be put too strongly, 

 for, no doubt, gr«at injury is done to 

 our market by these men. It is quite 

 a common thing in London to see 

 large shipments of honey from Amer- 

 ica and other places sold at 3 to 5 

 cents per pound.— Ed. C. B. J. 



[There are two sides to all debat- 

 able subjects. The above presents 

 good reasons for doing what the 

 American Bee Jouknal h»s for 

 years advised— that of building up 

 local markets in every village and 

 hamlet in America, and we still be- 

 lieve that to be the true solution of 

 the difficulty.- Ed.] 



seemed to abate, so that, in 1868, bees 

 were quite common again. 



As 1868 was a splendid honey sea- 

 son, bee-talk was rife in this locality, 

 which again brought to life old ambi- 

 tions which had been crushed out by 

 the former loss by disease among the 

 bees, so that the spring of 1869 found 

 Mr. I), with 2 colonies of bees of his 

 own, as the starting-point to his pres- 

 ent apiary. Wishing to know for him- 

 self all of the minutiae of this (to him) 

 interesting pursuit, he procured nearly 

 all the bee-books of that day, and 

 subscribed for the bee-papers. As 

 his ambition led him toward the prac- 

 tical side of bee-keeping, Quinby's 

 " Mysteries of Bee-Keeping Ex- 

 plained " was his favorite, the pages 

 of which were as familiar to him as 

 a nursery rhyme. His intense desire 

 to learn and investigate the bees in 



From Grieanings. 



GilDertM,Doolittle, 



A NEIGHBOR. 



G. M. Doolittle was born April 14, 

 1846, near his present location, in the 

 town of SpafEord, Onondaga County, 

 New York. His parents were natives 

 of Connecticut, and moved to this 

 State a few years before he was born ; 

 hence the thoroughness, energy and 

 activity of the " Yankee "' are largely 

 manifested in the subject of this 

 sketch. From his earliest youth, Mr. 

 D. has been an admirer of the busy 

 bee, taking great interest in them 

 when kept by his father. Later on, 

 nearly all the bees in this section of 

 country perished with foul brood, so 

 that from 1856 to 1862 a colony of bees 

 was a rarity. After this the disease 



every particular has been such that he 

 has dreamjd of them at night, and 

 thought of them in his working hours 

 to almost an absorbing extent, and 

 to-day he is still a student, believing 

 that there are many unexplored re- 

 gions, and much room for the deepest 

 thought, even on the practical part of 

 this pursuit. 



In the first years of his apicultural 

 study, Elisha Gallup, then living in 

 Iowa, gave him by letter much prac- 

 tical instruction, which, together with 

 Gallup's articles in the different 

 papers of that time, so grew into his 

 life that he went by the name of 

 " Gallup " among bee-keepers about 

 him for several years ; and to-day he 

 is often heard to say that there never 

 has, to his mind, been a greater man in 

 the realm of bee-keeping than E. 

 Gallup. Gallup, in his private letters, 

 laid great stress on good queens. 



claiming that around the queen cen- 

 tered all there was in bee-keeping, 

 which has caused the subject of this 

 sketch to study along the line of 

 queen-rearing to a much larger ex- 

 tent than any other part of this inter- 

 esting pursuit, and it is believed by 

 him that much of his success as a 

 honey-producer has come from this, 

 and his ever-anxious care to get the 

 hive filled with brood at such a time 

 that there would be multitudes of 

 field-bees at the opening of the honey 

 harvest, 



[Mr. G. M. Doolittle, whose likeness 

 is on this page, is one of the most 

 successful and practical of American 

 bee-keepers, and has a world-wide 

 reputation as such. He is well-known 

 as a writer for all the American bee- 

 periodicals, and faithfully gives his 

 plans and methods to the public year 

 after year. He is genial and com- 

 panionable, and one of America's 

 sons that she is proud to own and 

 honor. — Ed.] 



For tbe Araertcan Bee Joamal 



Sections Filled litli Comli. 



C. H. DIBBBKN. 



I have carefully read the articles of 

 Mr. Hutchinson, on page 200, and Mr. 

 Thielmann, on page 201. Mr. Hutch- 

 inson has hit the nail on the head 

 squarely, when he says : " I can think of 

 one reason why honey stored in drawn 

 comb might remain longer unsealed, 

 than that stored in foundation, that 

 was drawn but slightly in advance of 

 the filling ; i. e., the drawing out and 

 filling were both in progress at the 

 same time. The opportunity for 

 ripening is greater when the honey is 

 not very deep in the cells." That Is 

 just the conclusion I came to, after 

 years of experimenting. But the fact, 

 that honey stored in full, drawn comb 

 is more apt to sour than that built by 

 the bees or drawn from foundation, 

 is not my only objection to the use of 

 such combs. 



In an apiary that is run on correct 

 principles, there will be few or no 

 combs built during the white honey 

 harvest to carry over to another year 

 to be refilled. Then it is the combs 

 mainly built late in the season that 

 are extracted and carried over. Now 

 it is well known that comb partakes 

 largely of the color of the flowers on 

 which the bees are working at the 

 time. Such combs are usually dark 

 or yellow, and heavier than those 

 built in the white clover season. 

 Then, too, the wood of the sections is 

 always more or less soiled, either by 

 propolis, honey that has leaked out, 

 dust, bleached out by light, or stained 

 by getting wet. It is almost impos- 

 sible to get such sections to look as 

 neat and clean as new ones. 



Mr. Thielmann seems to think that 

 my trouble with old comb arises from 

 the fact that I did not have the bees 

 clean them up immediately after ex- 

 tracting. Now it this was the one 



