260 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



August 



While they wore cooking the noon 

 meal. I loafed ahout the swamp, af- 

 ter taking my bearings, for a man 

 readily gets lost in that immeuin oi 

 tlat. sandy, pine land. It was then 

 that I found out why they call by the 

 name oi "saw" palmetto the dwarf 

 palmetto, sabal serrulata. Its stem 

 is armed with sharp teeth like those 

 of a saw. The cabbage palmetto, so 

 rich looking in the heart of Florida, 

 is not to be found at this point. The 

 climate is too cool. 



The bees were making honey and I 

 noticed them sucking from some 

 huckleberrj blossoms, although I was 

 told that these plants produced no 

 honey. Dinner over, Bradley and 1 

 started in the auto truck through the 

 swamp. Following a winding trail 

 northward, occasionally passing a 

 darkey's cabin, one room with a door, 

 and windows without sash, only 

 wooden shutters. What do tiny live 

 on in this wilderness? Corn pones 

 and a little bacon. No chickens; 

 rarely a garden spot ; only a few 

 razor-back hogs running at large 

 about the swamp. Here and then' a 

 white man has settled. He tries to 

 grow crops, but his principal busi- 

 ness, if he is not a beekeeper (and 

 beekeepers are few and far between) 

 is to harvest the sap of the pines, 



which is distilled and made into tur- 

 pentine. Here and there a northern 

 man has grubbed out a fine farm, 

 built a good home with fences, and 

 has left. The house is empty. Why? 

 He was only a northern sucker! He 

 thought he would show the southern 

 people how to till the land, but the 

 white sand has gotten the best of 

 him. 



We traveled smite 50 miles th.it 

 afternoon and visited five apiaries. 

 We stopped at one of them a couple 

 of hours and put on supers, for we 

 had a lot of extracting supers with 

 us in the truck. Mr. Bradley is only 

 one of the numerous men Mr. Wilder 

 employs in his business. He is cer- 

 tainly a capable man. His crop of 

 1917 was 125 barrels. A mute testi- 

 monial of an extensive crop is to be 

 seen in the pile of empty combs and 

 supers and the empty barrels in 

 rough sheds at the apiaries, getting 

 ready for the next crop. The hives 

 are all 8-frame Langstroth, with 

 Hoffman frames, the supers half- 

 story. Occasionally a colony is given 

 two full stories, if the queen is suf- 

 ficiently prolific. Here I learned how 

 one can spread the brood in a hurry 

 with the Hoffman frame; as four or 

 five frames may be shifted at one 

 motion of the hive tool and an out- 



side frame inserted in the center. No 

 danger of chilling the brood in south- 

 ern Georgia in March, and Mr. Brad- 

 ley was spreading brood and insert- 

 ing empty combs in the center, every- 

 where. 



The Wilder apiaries contain a num- 

 ber of colonies of Caucasian bees. 

 These are great "propolizers," as has 



The Chincapin 



Chincapin in the Suwanee swamps 



been shown to us before by Mr. At- 

 water. At the Bradley apiaries I 

 saw colonies that had almost entirely 

 closed their wide entrance with pro- 

 polis, leaving but a small hole for the 

 workers to go back and forth, and 

 giving clear evidence of the correct- 

 ness of the name given by the an- 

 cients to this substance "pro polis," 

 two Greek words meaning "before 

 the city." A similar condition is 

 brought about by the bees in the 

 Holy Land, as mentioned by Mr. Bal- 

 densperger in our June number. The 

 endless fight against death-head 

 moths induces them to strengthen 

 and narrow down the "gates of the 

 city" with "pro polis." 



The apiaries are in the brush, away 

 from houses, close to the barely visi- 

 ble auto trail. In nearly every case 

 they are protected only by a posted 

 notice offering a reward of $50 for 

 the conviction of thieves. Mr. Brad- 

 ley has 15 apiaries under his ^charge. 

 He said that they lost several hun- 

 dred pounds of honey by thieves 

 every year. But what to do? The 

 Georgia "cracker," "poor white 

 trash" the negro calls him, is, like 

 the negro, of the opinion that what- 

 ever he finds in the woods is his 

 property, or ought to be. Hence an 

 occasional theft from the thrifty 

 apiarist, wdto must figure that in the 

 profit and loss; for to seek the thief 

 and have him punished would prob- 

 ably not he safe. Things burn easily 

 in the pine wilderness. Southern 

 Georgia was ablaze with forest fires 

 in every direction as I traveled 

 through it. and when Mr. Wilder 

 asked Mr. Bradley what the pros- 

 pect was for honey, the answer was, 

 "It is good if they don't burn us out." 

 Miles and miles of good bee-pasture 

 arc devastated by the carelessness of 

 the inhabitants, who seem to delight 

 in burning the woods. At each apiary, 

 the pine needles which cover the 

 ground must be regularly raked away 

 and destroyed, for fear of fire. 



The afternoon trip over, we re- 



