376 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



November 



picked over before th^ other kinds 

 are on the move. Probably this is 

 the chief reason why they get more 

 than any others. 



6, [f the day is rather dull or cool, 

 they will be working in full force. 

 though no other kind of bees will be 

 flying. 



7 I he queens are very prolfic. 



8. hi a fair season the smallest nu- 

 cleus will build up without feeding 

 into a grand colony for winter. So 

 much is this "building" quality pres- 

 ent in them that a good, strong col- 

 ony can be divided into 20 at the 

 end of May and each will build up 

 in a good season, without feeding, 

 into a 10-frame colony well stored 

 for winter, and yield one or two 

 20-pound supers of honey from the 

 heather. 



9. They heat every other kind of 

 bees in their working energies. 



10. Tiny live longer than any oth- 

 ers. 



11. They fill and seal sections fuller 

 and cap them whiter than any other 

 race. 



12. For extracted honey they have 

 no equals. 



13. They can eat the hardest and 

 driest of sugar; in fact they will 

 carry away the hardest and driest 

 sugar loaf (when no honey is to be 

 had) put under a shed and kept as 

 dry as possible, thus reducing the 

 trouble of summer, spring and win- 

 ter feeding to a lower point than 

 has ever been considered possible. 



14. Although they search out 

 sweets and carry them off anywhere, 

 they are not inclined to rob their 

 hives, honesty being with them a 

 ruling guide or principle. 



15. They swarm earlier than any 

 others. 



16. They fill cracks or chinks with 

 an enormous quantity of propolis, 

 and if natural supplies fail, nothing 

 sticky comes amiss — bird lime, coal 

 tar, etc. Some may deny that this is 

 a desirable quality, but with it they 

 keep their combs clean and thus 

 make anything do. hives or baskets. 



17. Thev cluster well on their 



combs, spread evenly over them and 

 shake off readily. 



18. They build little drone comb, 

 but plenty of worker comb, as white 

 as snow. 



Baldensperger's Notes 



1. The Punics are not quick to 

 sting, but tluy sling when disturbed, 

 for transferring, etc. 



2. A cross with Palestine bees -in 

 1888 made them pretty ugly, not to 

 he compared with pure Palestinians, 

 to be true. 



3. Have seen them quiet in North 

 Africa, not a single bee flying at 40 

 degrees. 



4. Have not seen them fly in the 

 snow. 



5. They begin work with all the 

 Palestinians, in a honey-flow, h 

 "peep of day," and get no more 

 honey than any others. 



6. Our Palestine bees fly for honey, 

 even if it is raining some, and so do 

 the Punics, but they are not su- 

 superior. 



7. Queens are very prolific, as also 

 are the Easterners. 



8. In a fair season, a small nu- 

 cleus will build up, provided there is 

 a honey-flow. This building up does 

 not go very far. My brothers in Al- 

 giers could not even double their 

 colonies, though they made efforts. 

 All they could do was to keep their 

 64 colonies. They had to reduce 

 them to SO in 1890. I took 195 pounds 

 of extracted honey from one colony 

 of Palestines, 130 pounds orange 

 honey in Jaffa, 65 pounds thyme 

 honey in the mountains of Judea. 



9 The foregoing paragraph does 

 not prove it. 



10. I cannot say. 



11. Have found them poor section 

 builders, as all Easterners, and their 

 section honey appears dirty from 

 their tight cappings, and the propolis 

 smeared on every comb. Tried them 

 from 1892 to 1900. 



12. None are better than the Pal- 

 estines. 



13. Have not seen them carry away 

 any loaf. 



14. They search out sweets to an 



alarming extent and rob their neigh- 

 bors as well as do their Bedouin 

 lords and masters. Honesty is un- 

 known to them in any way, shape or 

 fashion. 



15. Possibly they do. 



16. Every Eastern race uses pro- 

 polis to a great extent. In Sarona, a 

 swarm hanging on a tree was almost 

 entirely surrounded with a protect- 

 ing curtain of propolis. 



17. Not as readily as Palestinians. 



18. Yes, they are inclined to build 

 less drone combs than Palestinians. 



The enormous number of queen- 

 cells mentioned by "A Hallamshire 

 Beekeeper" was not found by me. I 

 abandoned this race. The last colony 

 I had in Palestine built only three or 

 four queen-cells. 



As a rule, bees are less liable to 

 sting when they have the swarming 

 fever than at other moments. Tunis- 

 ians and North Africans do not dif- 

 fer, to my knowdedge. 



Palestine, Cyprus, Tunisia, Algeria 

 and Southern France, all countries 

 in which I have lived and observed 

 bees during the summers, are not 

 prone to such enormous and con- 

 tinual honey-flows as to permit the 

 development of, say, more than a 

 half dozen colonies in one summer 

 from a single hive, to say nothing of 

 stores for winter. 



Nice. France. 



Florida 



l:> T. V. Porter 



IN the July and August numbers of 

 the American Bee Journal the 

 editor relates his experience of 

 "A Month in Florida," and prefaces 

 his remarks by saying that "beekeep- 

 ers who never went to Florida, and 

 never will go there, can be counted 

 by the thousands, so perhaps many 

 of our subscribers will enjoy reading 

 the experiences of a winter month 

 spent in the South." While I belong 

 to the other class, the few that go 

 there, I believe my enjoyment in 

 reading the articles was intensified 

 many fold on that account. The 

 mention of Fargo, Georgia, and the 

 Suwanee river brought to mind the 

 first view that wife and I had of the 

 coastal plain country. We had been 

 traveling all night and stopped for a 

 tew minutes in the morning at Fargo, 

 where we could look from the car 

 window into a dense growth of tan- 

 gled trees draped with long festoons 

 of greenish-gray moss and a large 

 part of the wierd scene reproduced in 

 the mirror-like waters of the song- 

 famed Suwanee river, wife declaring 

 that she could compare it to nothing 

 hut her childhood dreams of fairy- 

 land. 



\ lay in Jacksonville, as it was 

 then, was enough (ii is bone-dry 

 now) and we passed on to St. Augus- 

 tine. As barefoot school kids we had 

 ..ft en gazed at a picture of the old 

 city gate in the geographies of _ 50 

 years ago and were intent on seeing 

 it. Having been several weeks on 

 the way, and tired of hotels ami res 

 taurants. we went to housekeeping in 

 a modest way, and in buying supplies 

 for the table from a near-by grocer, 



