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HIVING SWARMS. 



How to Secure the Swarms that 

 Alight High. 



Written for the American Bee Journal 



BY C. W. HELLEMS. 



I have kept bees about all my life 

 time, on a small scale, just for my own 

 use and amusement ; and for the last 

 few years I have tried to combine 

 pleasure and profit on a large scale, 

 but living- in the city I have not ground 

 enough to accommodate more than 

 about 70 colonies, and then they are 

 rather close together. 



Until last j'ear they had proved to 

 be quite profitable, but then the crop 

 was not more than one-fourth of that 

 of former years. I have been in the 

 habit of going up trees, some times as 

 high as 40 feet, to take a swarm of 

 bees ; but two years ago last season I 

 had a fall of 21 feet. The ladder 

 slipped off of the limb that it was rest- 

 ing upon, and down I went, ladder, 

 bees and all, to the ground. I was 

 bruised, and pretty well shaken up, 

 but no bones broken, but I secured the 

 bees after a little while. 



I then thought that I must use some 

 other means of catching runaway 

 swarms. I was getting too old a man 

 to climb trees, being then in my 78th 

 year, and my weight was 210 pounds. 



I got a long, light pole, and fastened 

 a small tackle block at the top of it, 

 with a cord to run through the block. 

 I made a small hi\ing-box that would 

 hold 3 or 4 racks with combs in tliem, 

 that the honey had been extracted 

 from. When the bees had settled on 

 a limb, I would put the pole up against 

 that limb, and run the box up, eithiM- 

 under or over the bees, giving them 

 quite a jar, and in five or ten minutes 

 they would all gather in the box on 

 the combs. I let them down by the 

 cord, and took them to the hive al- 

 ready prepared for them. This worked 

 very well. 



Last season I thought of and tried 

 another plan. I planted a pole in 

 about the centre of the bee-yard, about 

 50 feet high, with a tackle block at the 

 top of it, and a cord to reach to the 

 ground ; when the bees began to come 

 out to swarm, I run the hiving-box up 

 as high as most of the bees were fly- 

 ing, kejjt the box moving slowly up 

 and down a few feet, and often by the 

 time the bees were half out of" the 

 liive, they would begin to gather in 

 tlie hiving box. As soon as they were 

 settled, I lowered them carefully, and 

 took the box to the hive already pre- 

 pared for them, and either shook off 

 the bees in front of the hive, or lifted 

 the frames and bees all out and put 

 them in the hive, when the job was done. 



I have often, in preventing bees 

 from leaving the hive, taken a comb 

 from the hi\'e they came from, with 

 brood in it, and put it into the hive of 

 the new colony. I have never had 

 them leave the hive since I adopted 

 that plan. 



This above-described pole-arrange- 

 ment is new to me, and whether anj' 

 one ever used it before, I do not know ; 

 but so far it has worked well. The 

 hiving-box is made out of f-inch stuff, 

 very light, and just long enough to 

 hang the frames in lengthwise, the 

 same as in the hive, and wide enough 

 to hold 4 or more frames. I found 

 that combs lately extracted are the 

 best. 



If the apiary is large, I think that by 

 having poles jjlaced in different parts 

 of the yard would save much trouiile. 

 When I leave the yard in swarming 

 time, I always run the hiving-liox up, 

 and leave it tlicre until I return. I 

 then made another tight box that would 

 hold the. hiving-box, and I keep the 

 hiving-box in it, with the combs alwaj'S 

 ready for use, but covered up so that 

 bees in the yard cannot get at them on 

 the ground, at the bottom of the pole, 

 read\' for use. 



Bees did very poorly the past season 

 in this locality, many of the colonies 

 not gathei-ing enough to winter on. I 

 have 40 cidonies on the summer stands, 

 packed in chaff hives, and so far they 

 are doing well. 



St. Catherines, Ont. 



GOOD QUEENS. 



Are the " Queens Not Reared by 

 Natural Sivarming Inferior i" 



TTrttfeii fur Oie American Bee Journal 

 BY o. O. rOPPLETOX. 



On page 135, Mr. Doolittle has an 

 article on the above subject, the most 

 of which meets my hearty approval, 

 but not all, and a further discussion of 

 so important a branch of bee-keeping 

 can do no harm. 



All that part of Mr. Doolittle's arti- 

 cle which condemns the cheap, un- 

 scientific methods of queen-rearing, 

 meets my more than hearty approval, 

 and the more that such influential 

 writers on bee-culture as he is, will 

 hammer away on that line, the better 

 it will be for the interests of that pur- 

 suit ; but readers are always quick to 

 detect an over-statement of facts on 

 which opinions and advice are founded, 

 and any such over-statement always 

 lessens the effects of such good advice. 



The whole question simply is, 

 whether queens reared by the best arti- 

 ficial methods known, are equal to 

 those properly reared under the 

 swarming impulse ; and neither Mr. 



Demaree's alleged mistake (I have 

 none of the back numbers of the 

 American Bee Journal here in Cuba 

 with me, so I cannot examine the arti- 

 cle referred to), nor Mr. Doolittle"s 

 mistake of comparing naturally-reared 

 queens with poorly-reared artificial 

 ones, touches the real point under dis- 

 cussion at all. Phiusible and seem- 

 ingly correct theories bj- scores, (I 

 might almost say hundreds), have been 

 given why such and such methods of 

 rearing queens are the best, but the 

 real truth of these theories must be 

 tested bj- the manj' wide-awake, prac- 

 tical bee-keepers of our country who 

 are rearing and handling queens by 

 tlie hundreds, and only by their imited 

 exiiericnce fur a series of ) ears can the 

 ri'al facts be known. 



Like many others who have made 

 honey-producing their special business, 

 I long ago learned that good queens 

 were an absolutely essential element 

 of success in that line, and to aid me 

 in learning how to secure such queens, 

 for several years previous to being 

 compelled to leave Iowa on account of 

 failing health, I kept an account of the 

 method by which each queen in my 

 apiary was reared. The four or five 

 years that I kept this record before 

 leaving, was too short and incomplete 

 to be a definite guide, but it gave me 

 some ideas. 



It caused me to entirely abandon, 

 even for experimental purposes, all 

 careless methods of rearing queens, 

 such as having them reared in nuclei, 

 in weak colonies, or, in fact, in any 

 colonies not in a thriving, vigorous 

 and normal condition. The record 

 was kept long enough to thoroughly 

 satisfy me on this point. Although 

 not fully satisfied of its correctness, I 

 was coming to the conclusion that 

 queens reared by any method, would 

 average better if reared during. the 

 swarming season of the year ; and 

 mav not this account largely for the 

 preference given by Mr. Doolittle and 

 others to naturally-reared queens ? 



The method of taking an old queen 

 away from a strong colony, and allow- 

 ing cells to be built on any or all of 

 the combs was not satisfactory as re- 

 gards quality of queens or ease of 

 manipulation. Giving such a colony 

 of bees a single comb of selected brood 

 on which to build cells, was better in 

 both respects, but not equal in the 

 latter to the Alley plan. The Jones 

 plan of getting natural queens gave as 

 good ones as any, but I did not suc- 

 ceed in doing the manipulating as 

 easily as I wished. I shall trj' to test 

 that method further while down here. 



Natural swarming gave good queens, 

 but at an expense of extra labor not 

 justified bj' the result. I had so little 

 natural swarming in my apiary that I 



