1877 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



!>9 



f'N the March No. the question was asked how much of 

 the queen's wing should bo cut olT. Your answer 

 WHS the ti)) end. The answer i« incorrect, i" will not 

 answer. I lni\e liuowii them to lly with tin; swanii wlii;n 

 it was half cut olT. 'i'lie.v some'imes iieL \(iy Kuiall at 

 swarniiiiff time : it wants cutiins .^u to make a sun' iliiuK. 

 Ai.BEKT I'OTTKK. Eureka, Wis., March Stl>., Is7". 

 When a boy, we kept "hens," and if we 

 clipped t)oth winjis, tliey would fly very well 

 with a Utile practice, but if we clipped but 

 one, they would swing round and soon come 

 down. We have tossed queens up in the air 

 aftLr thus olipping the tip of one wing, and 

 they seemed to do about the same way. We 

 have had them hop a little way from the hive, 

 but never knew a clipped queen to lead off a 

 swarm. It may do no harm, to make sure 

 work of it, but we dislike to see them unnec- 

 essarily mutilated. That a ((ueen may lead a 

 swarm away with half of both wings clipped 

 off, we can readily imagine, but how she can 

 " paddle " enough faster with a half wing on 

 one side, to keep up with a whole one on the 

 other, is beyond our comprehension. Will 

 other brothers please testify ? 



m I • ■ m 



HOW MAT^Y BROOD COMBS, AlVD 

 BUOAD HIVES. 



K^OIJ say on page 70, C L. combs for brood chamber is 

 fll sufBcient in summer in raising box honey. I would 

 like to see you couiine one of my queens to(i frames 

 or 10 either at times ; and that brings me to the matter of 

 hives. I used 2- story L. hives altogether until the sum- 

 mer of '70, when I made 'i of the 1-story for 20 frames 

 and last year adopted them altogether, and have no desire 

 to change. 1 never could confine brood to the lower story 

 in the fall of the year, and witli division boards, or what 

 is better, I think, chafT cushions, you do not open so much 

 space at once as with the 2-story hive. You saj in supple- 

 ment, Sept., 1S75, the 1-story hive may be regarded as a 

 simpler hive to manage, in all localities where outdoor 

 wintermg is considered safe. The past winter has been 

 called "the c«ldcst iu the recollection of the oldest inhab- 

 itant" and I had no trouble with the single stories. I 

 have some with a cushion or small mattress filled with 

 stripped husks on each side of the bees ; others with the 

 bees in south end of hive and a division board next, and 

 others with the quilt tucked down instead of a division 

 board, which I like best until 1 want so much room the 

 quilt will not reach the bottom. 



Now you have got to using chaff and wintering on sum- 

 mer stands the long hive ought to just suit you as the 

 frames can be tm-ned with sides to the entrance and put 

 chaff cushions all around and then the space directly over 

 (he bees that you say you can not afford to lose, can be 

 vised with a hoop between hive and cover. At any rate I 

 think the "New Idea" best suited to this climate. 



G. W. Gates. Bartlett, Tenn., Feb. 21th, '77. 

 It is an easy matter to get some brood in the 

 center of each frame, in as many as 10 frames, 

 or even more, but we do not know as we ever 

 saw more lirood in one hive than could be put 

 in G L. frames, if they were tilled clear out to 

 the sides and up to the top bar, as our friends 

 Dean and Doolittle have them. The broad 

 hives do very well, if you are going to raise 

 extracted honey only, but even for that, we 

 think with longer experience, you will say the 

 honey is not stored in the outside combs with 

 the same readiness that it is in combs directly 

 over tlie brood. If we use the extractor only 

 on the combs in the upper story, we shall find 



the 2-story hive the easiest to work with, and 

 we shall be in no danger of having our bees 

 starve because we have extracted too closely 

 Hundreds of our readers have tested the broad 

 hives, and perhaps 9-lOths of them have one 

 after anotlier, discarded them. If you look 

 over the back volumes of any of the Journals, 

 you will see their reports. Turning the combs 

 around for v.'inter is so much " fussing," that 

 very few will ever take the trouble to do it. 



HOW I?IAIVY KOQS CAN A QUEEN L,AY 7 



REPLY TO TOWNLEV. 



E REALLY are very much surprised that so 

 many doubt that a good queen can produce 

 86,000 living bees at once, and especially friend 

 Townley. After reading in the A. B- J., a few years 

 ago, statements made by D. L. Adair, E. Gallup, llos- 

 mer and others in the West, of queens that would 

 keep a 4.010 cubic inch hive occupied with brood for 



3 months in suceeb.sion, wc were greatly disapiiointed 

 to find that the best we couhl do was to get only 1,000 

 square inches of comb kept full of brood for three 

 months, by the very best queens wc could procure 

 from any breeders, and we sent for queens to nearly 

 every breeder in the United States. On an average, 

 our queens would only occupy 800 square inches ol 

 comb, and as we did not wish our honey in the brood 

 combs, but in the boxes, we adopted 9 Gallup frames, 

 or 1,035 square Inches of comb capacity, as the right 

 size for the brood chamber, to secure the best results 

 in box honey. From 200 to 250 square inches of this 

 comb will contain honey and pollen, with our man- 

 agement, leaving about SOO square inches as the brood 

 capacity of the queen. Now, friend T., we have never 

 said that our queens keijt 8 out of 9 frames filled with 

 brood, but that they kei)t 800 square inches full of 

 brood, and that would take but 7 out of the 9, leaving 

 2 for honey and pollen, and we really have been feel- 

 ing bad that our queens would average no better. 

 Many of our queens, by the use of a division board, 

 will fill the frames so full that there will not be 100 

 cells to the frame, (say 5 or 6 frames), occupied with 

 pollen or honey even, so we have brood capped 

 all along the top-bar and side-bars of the frames, 

 while the other 3 or 4 will be from two-thirds to three- 

 fourths full. 



HOW MANV CELLS TO THE INCH. 



As regards the number of cells to the ihch, we had 

 measured many times, and supposed worker comb 

 near enough to call it 5 cells to the inch. But for fear 

 that we had not tested it thoroughly, we went to our 

 shop where we had 300 frames stored, all built by 

 Italian or hybrid bees— we have had no black bees for 



4 years— and measured those that had had brood in 

 them, and we found one or two combs in the lot that 

 29 cells made just 6 inches. We also found one that to 

 make 6 inches it took 31 cells, and the rest run from 

 29 to 31 cells to every 6 inches in length. Wc then 

 went for our honey boxes, and there wc found quite a 

 number with just 4it cells to the inch : in fact, every- 

 thing from 5 cells down to 'iX. We have also had 

 Italian bees build comb in the bod}' of the hive when, 

 honey was coming in very rapidly. VA cells to the 

 inch, but the queen would not readily lay in such 

 comb. Now, friend Townley, where your bees build 

 4,^ cells to the inch, is it not when the honey is com- 

 ing in so that the queen does not keep pace with the 

 bees, or iu other words, do they not build comb faster 

 than the queen can occupy it with eggs, and is not the 

 queen loth to lay in them .' 



