18 Kansas State Horticultural Society. 



that I sold the 20 pounds of comb honey at $6.25 with an expense of 88 cents, 

 leaving a profit of $5.37 to me. You see I have a difference of $1.82 to pay me 

 for the extra trouble in getting supers ready and the extra trouble it requires 

 in working the bees. One thing to take into account in favor of comb honey 

 is the taking care of extracting combs. They must be either put back on the 

 bees or thoroughly treated to kill and prevent the wax moth from destroying 

 them. It does not cost quite as much per pound to pack extracted honey in 

 60-po"und cans, but the price per pound for it in that size package is nearly 

 always less. It can be seen that even if the bees do not produce as much 

 comb honey as they do extracted, the price averages, or has averaged with me, 

 about two-thirds more. The prices I quote are the highest I received for 

 both kinds this last year. The work of getting the supers ready, folding the 

 sections, putting in the foundation, etc., comes in the winter when a little 

 work is welcomed, and I would rather have it to do then than not. It is 

 mighty, bad business for a bee man who has as many as say 100 comb-honey 

 supers to get ready to wait till he sees whether there is going to be a crop or 

 not. It requires too much time, and the bees will not wait for anything, and 

 it pays to have everything all ready. 



Now, as to handling bees to produce honey, there are, I believe, almost 

 as many systems as there are men. There are plenty of books, and good, 

 well-written books, by men who have had experience and know the game. If 

 I haven't read them all it is because I have not been able to get them. I am 

 not going to attempt to tell you how it should be done. You can get books' 

 that will tell you that. I will try to tell you how I work, and the plan may 

 or may not .suit ymi. 



My bees are all in outyards. I have more than 400 colonies, and they are 

 all in the country, or will be in the spring, but a dozen or so that I keep at 

 home to raise queens with and help with increase there. You see that any 

 intensive plan such as you will find in Doctor Miller's "Fifty Years Among 

 the Bees" is out of the question. First I will tell you why my bees are in 

 small outyards. My location is a good one, providing it rains enough, which 

 it does not often do. But very often one locality just a few miles away 

 will get one or two rains in one season that another location will not get. I 

 have had one or two yards give me a fair crop, while others in the same 

 season had to be fed for winter. A rain makes a big difference. My bees 

 are in eight yards of from thirty-four to sixty colonies each. My bees are 

 wintered — or that is what I try to do — in two hive bodies. I use ten-frame 

 hives. If they should be wintered on one set of combs I put another set on 

 in the spring when I unpack them. They then have plenty of room for 

 almost any kind of a queen. I clip all queens in the spring, and try to get 

 it done during fruit bloom. Then an inventory of the hives is taken and the 

 condition of the colonies is marked on the hives. One can devise any way to 

 do this that suits. When I clip a queen I put an X on some part of the 

 hive, with the date. When I find a clipped queen I put an there. When I 

 find no queen I put a QX there, so I know where to find them with a new 

 queen. At that time a colony must have plenty of stores to sustain it until 

 the flow. After the stores are supplied and the requeening is done, they are 

 left till they begin to build up pretty strong. Then I inspect and see that 



