236 RESOURCES OF CALIFORNIA. 
and that they thrive better here than east of the mountains. 
A good hive here will make two hundred pounds of honey, or 
may be made to produce twenty swarms in a season, an in- 
crease ten times as great, and a production of honey five times 
as large as that in the Eastern States. Mr. H. Hamilton, a 
bee-keeper of Stockton, reports that he had thirty-five swarms 
of bees on the first of February, 1860; and by the first of 
October, they had increased to five hundred hives, and pro- 
duced twenty thousand and seventy-five pounds of honey; a 
production said to be without parallel. Bees are not idle during 
six months of the year, as in New York, but busy during nine 
or ten months. They find their food in wild and cultivated 
flowers, in the blossoms of manzanita bushes, fruit-trees, prasses, 
clovers, and grains, in grapes, fruits, and honey-dew. They 
seem to thrive in the driest portions of the state, where there 
are no cultivated fields and no flowers or green herbage. They 
are very fond of apricots, which they eat in places where the 
skin has been previously cut through by bugs. When the 
latter have made a hole, the bees come and eat side by side 
with the bugs, which are of the “‘Jady-bug” kind, and other 
similar species. Many of the bees lose their lives in conse- 
quence of their fondness for the apricot. Hither they eat too 
much, or they eat the meat after it has passed into the alco- 
holic fermentation ; but whether intoxicated or surfeited, they 
are unable to get home, and they perish during the night. In 
places where the honey-dew is abundant, especially in the 
mountains on the eastern border of the Tulare valley, the 
bees make honey very rapidly. When the food for bees was 
becoming scarce in the midsummer of 1860, in the Santa Clara 
valley, a man owning seventy hives sent them to the vicinity 
of Visalia, so that they could get honey-dew. Indeed it is the 
custom of several bee-keepers in California, to move their bees 
about from place to place, according to the pasture and the 
season. Hitherto little honey has been sold in the market, the 
chief object of bee-keepers being to produce swarms, which 
for a time were worth one hundred dollars each. This busi- 
