1918 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



The Jewell apiary at Mt. Hope 



spair of getting into the open. Doc- 

 tor Rarrington is one of those genial, 

 whole-souled beekeepers that it is a 

 joy to meet. It is plain that nature 

 intended him to be a beekeeper first. 



Raffington reports that his big fall 

 yields are from heartsease, and Nin- 

 inger has sometimes averaged as 

 high as 50 pounds of comb honey 

 from this source. They usually have 

 about three weeks of flow from 

 horsemint in early summer, with an 

 average of about 35 pounds per col- 

 ony of surplus. Alfalfa and sweet 

 clover furnish the principal crop. 

 Along the stream there is a variety 

 of such trees as willows, which fur- 

 nish early pollen and some nectar, 

 as well as fall flowers which add to 

 the total production. False indigo is 

 a common shrub in the river bottom, 

 and yields nectar freely in May. 



Mt. Hope is the Mecca of every 

 Kansas beekeeper, for here it is that 

 the popular president of the State 

 Association, C. D. Mize, has his api- 

 ary. The site is one of the most at- 

 tractive for an apiary that the writer 

 has ever seen. A grove shelters it 

 from the wind from the north and 

 west, while furnishing shade from 

 the sun. The hives are set between 

 the big Cottonwood trees that grow 

 in a row along the edge of the grove. 

 No photograph can do half justice 

 to the beauty of the apiary. In addi- 

 tion to one long row of hives facing 

 south, there are several short rows 

 facing east. Every hive and fixture 

 is nicely painted, and everything is 

 arranged as neatly as the utensils 

 in the kitchen of a fastidious house- 

 wife. 



Mr. E. W. Jewell, a local merchant, 

 has an apiary equally neat, although 

 arranged on a different plan. There 

 is a friendly rivalry between the two 

 men, which adds interest to their 

 hobby. Not far from town was a big 

 field of sweet clover which was 

 humming with bees. Our little party 

 greatly admired the luxuriant 

 growth, and envied the two men 

 whose bees were gathering the har- 



vest. At that time the bees were do- 

 ing nothing over a large area of the 

 middle west, where the entire sea- 

 son has been a failure. 



Dr. Bohrer joined the party for a 

 day at Hutchinson. In spite of his 

 more than four score years, Doctor 

 Bohrer is still quite a vigorous young 

 man, and as enthusiastic as ever 

 about bees. It was in the early days 

 of grasshoppers and drought that he 

 came to Kansas and startled the con- 

 servative newcomers by planting an 

 orchard. In spite of discouragement, 

 the doctor succeeded in producing 

 both honey and apples in quantity, at 

 the time when it was thought that 

 not much of anything that the set- 

 tlers had known in their old homes 

 could be grown in Kansas. 



With the planting of alfalfa and 

 sweet clover, honey production has 

 become a paying enterprise in this 

 section of Kansas. The rainfall is 

 too uncertain to insure profitable 

 corn crops, but alfalfa has proved 

 the foundation of a profitable gen- 



373 



eral agriculture, which is clearly in- 

 dicated by the appearance of the 

 homes of the farmers in the valley. 

 More and more of the crop is planted 

 from year to year, so that the stabil- 

 ity of beekeeping is constantly im- 

 proving. 



The conditions of northern and 

 eastern Kansas are somewhat differ- 

 ent, but these must wait to be told 

 in a future article. 



The Ontario Provincial Aparist 



By Morley Pettit 



IT is with considerable satisfaction 

 that the former provincial api- 

 arist announces the appointment 

 of a most worthy successor in the 

 person of Dr. B. X. Gates, A. IV, A 

 M.. Ph. D„ late of the State College 

 of Agriculture, Amherst, Mass. 



Born on December 19, 1881, in Wor- 

 cester, Mass., Burton Noble Gates 

 graduated in Arts from Clark Col- 

 lege in his home city in 1905. He 

 took his Master's degree from Clark 

 University the following year and at 

 once began lecturing in beekeeping 

 at the State College. In 1907 he be- 

 came Apicultural Assistant in the 

 Bureau of Entomology at Washing- 

 ton, D. C, where he remained, doing 

 excellent work under Dr. Phillips, un- 

 til 1910. In 1909 he prepared a thesis 

 on cluster conditions in winter, for 

 which he was granted the degree of 

 Doctor of Philosophy by Clark Uni- 

 versity. During this time Dr. Gates' 

 annual course of lectures at Amherst 

 was not interrupted, and in 1910 he 

 resigned his position at Washington 

 to become Assistant Associate Pro- 

 fessor of Beekeeping, Apiarist of the 

 Experiment Station and Inspector of 

 Apiaries for the State of Massachu- 

 setts. 



The beekeeping work of the Massa- 

 chusetts Agricultural College was 

 started with Dr. Gates' coming to 

 Amherst from Washington. At the 

 same time the inspection of apiaries 

 under the State Board of Agriculture 

 was started, the legislative act hav- 

 ing been passed during the session of 



