e (i)ee- 



eepeps |\evie(x; 



A MONTHLY JOURNAL 



Devoted to tl^e Interests of Hoqey Producers. 



$L00 A YEAR. 

 W. Z. HOTCHINSON, Editor and ProDiielor. 



VOL VII. FLINT, MICHIGAN, MAY 10. 1894. NO. 5. 



Work at M!ioliigan.'s 



ExperiiTiental 



-A^piary. 



E. li. TAYLOE, APIAEIST. 

 SOME EXPEEIMENTS IN WINTERING. 



T7\URING last 

 lJ fall and win- 

 ter I made such 

 efforts as I coald 

 under existing 

 circumstances to 

 get some light on 

 the problems 

 growing ou t of 

 the matter of win- 

 tering bees. My 

 bee-cellar is un- 

 der my honey 

 house and is fifteen by thirty feet with a cis- 

 tern in one end. I have wintered bees in this 

 cellar for seven or eight years with almost 

 uniformly excellent success and yet it now 

 seems certain, from my experiments with a 

 hygrometer, to be a very damp one, there 

 being a difference, at a temperature of from 

 45° to 50°, between the wet bulb and the dry 

 bulb, of only one-half a degree, which indi- 

 cates that the percentage of moisture is 

 about 9() — almost complete saturation. 



It is claimed by many prominent bee- 

 keepers that moisture is one of the principal 

 causes, if not the principal cause, of the win- 

 ter disease of bees known as dysentery, but 



if this were true I should have expected to 

 find it prevailing largely among my bees 

 during the last winter, but such did not prove 

 to be the case. In fact, though I suffered a 

 larger percentage of loss than I ever did be- 

 fore in this cellar — about 20 per cent. — yet 

 only a small proportion of those that per- 

 ished showed even a little evidence of that 

 disorder. I discovered only two cases that 

 could be called really bad, in one of which 

 the colony died and in the other the colony 

 had regained its health and was in good or- 

 der and of good strength when removed from 

 the cellar, and still remains so. This case 

 was a peculiar one. The hive was an eight- 

 frame L. hive and the bottom board was left 

 on in the wintering. Such a forbidding re- 

 ceptacle for bees as this was when taken from 

 the cellar about the tenth of April, I have 

 seldom seen. The bottom board was covered 

 with a mass of sticky ordure to such an ex- 

 tent that only now and then would a bee ven- 

 ture upon it to gain the outside of the hive. 

 The cover was well sealed on and when pried 

 off it ran with the almost incredible amount 

 of water and the honey board and combs 

 outside the cluster were wet and white with 

 mould. When the bottom board was re- 

 moved and a clean one substituted, the bees 

 came out to fly as clean, healthy and strong 

 as one would care to see. 



I cannot reconcile this case, as well as 

 many others I have examined recently, with 

 the theory that moisture is the cause of dys- 

 entery. Yet I think I have good evidence 

 that moisture under certain circumstances 



