THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW. 



331 



house warm, but failed, aud lost nearly half 

 of his bees. He has added a sub-earth ven- 

 tilator hopins? that the air will be warmed 

 by passing through the underground tube. 

 He has finally written to Mr. (i. M. Doolittle 

 for his advice, and Mr. Doolittle has given 

 his views of the matter in the A. B. J. 



In the first place, Mr. Doolittle says the 

 house is too small, that a larger number of 

 bees is required to keep up the necessary 

 heat in a building above ground. He calls 

 attention to the fact, as I did last month in 

 reviewing Mr. Hill's article, that there is no 

 warming principle in a bee house above 

 ground ; that all the heat must come from 

 the bees or from an oil-stove or something 

 of that description. All that the walls do is 

 to confine the heat ; they do not originate 

 any heat. The only thing that can be done 

 with such a repository is to resort to artifi- 

 cial heat. For this purpose Mr. Doolittle 

 thinks an oil-stove as good as anything, but 

 he would have a pipe arranged to carry ofi' 

 the gases of combustion. 



If the house cannot be arranged to keep 

 the temperature between 40° and 4.5% Mr. 

 Doolittle would advise the wintering of the 

 bees in the open air. 



In regard to the underground tube, he says 

 that it will modify the temperature of the 

 air to a certain extent, but not sufficiently. 

 He says the cold air so chills the earth sur- 

 rounding the tube that even with a tube 100 

 feet long and buried three feet deep, air will 

 sometimes be below the freezing point when 

 it enters the repository. 



Mr. Doolittle has had experience with sub- 

 earth ventilators and upper ventilators. He 

 began closing them little by little until he 

 learned they were of no value, and, after 

 two winters with no ventilation except sucli 

 as comes through walls of masonry and 

 earth, he can say his bees need no other ven- 

 tilation. 



A VISIT TO MEDINA. 



This is written sitting at Ernest's desk at 

 the "Home of the Honey Bee," in Medina, 

 Ohio. Around me is the click of type setting 

 and type writers, while from below comes 

 the whirring sound of machinery in motion. 

 For a long time I have desired to visit this 

 establishment. I have often tried to imagine 

 how I should feel when walking over from 

 the station and looking up at that stone bee 

 hive over the inscription, " In God we trust." 



Yesterday morning I experienced that sen- 

 sation and found it fully as pleasurable as I 

 had expected it would be. 



The first man to discover and welcome me 

 was W. P. Root, the proof reader and steno- 

 grapher. We had often corresponded in 

 short hand. In fact, I once wrote an article 

 in short hand for (lleanings and VV. P. put 

 it in type directly from the short hand man- 

 uscript. He grasped my hand and said : 

 " You are the man I have long been wanting 

 to see," and led the way up to the office. 



I had heard that nearly every visitor to the 

 Root establishment had been surprised at its 

 magnitude, consequently I had made up my 

 mind that / was not going to be surprised, 

 but I was. I was not surprised at the out- 

 side of the buildings— the illustrations in 

 Gleanings have shown these quite fairly — but 

 it seemed to me as though they were about 

 three times as large inside as they were out- 

 side. Medina is not a large city — about 

 2,0t)0 inhabitants — and almost from necessity 

 many trades must be represented at tiiis one 

 institution. The sending away for repairs, 

 and the delays from getting out of many 

 things, would be too expensive. There are 

 many things that Ernest said he would glad- 

 ly drop, and rid himself of so much worry, 

 but it seemed well-nigh impossible to do so. 



Ernest showed me over the establishment, 

 then by a sort of tacit agreement he went 

 about his work and allowed me to roam 

 about at my own sweet will. You see, we 

 were to go on together to Albany and we 

 both knew that we would have plenty of op- 

 portunity for visiting while on the road. 

 The beauty of my visit was that everybody 

 seemed to know me at once. This may be 

 accounted for by the fact that every employe 

 receives a copy of Gleanings. In five min- 

 utes the pressman and I were deep in a dis- 

 cussion of hard and soft "packing" for 

 cylinder presses, of the kind of paper needed 

 for the various kinds of work, the best inks, 

 etc., etc. Then he fished out his printers' 

 magazines and we looked them over. This 

 is a fair sample of how I put in my time. 



I don't remember ever going through such 

 a large establishment where everything was 

 quite so neat and clean. Ernest remarked, 

 in a joking way, in a recent issue of Glean- 

 ings, that if folks would only let them know 

 when they were coming, they would have a 

 "clarin'up" spell before their arrival. Of 

 course, my visit was known in advance, but 

 somehow I feel just as though there was no 



