THE 
JOURNAL. 
Vol. II.— No. 10.] MARCH 
Editorial. 
HINTS FOR APRIL. 
If the weather he at all favorable, bees in 
good localities will still be bringing in some 
honey, and where late Enealypts are flower- 
ing, will do so pretty briskly; nevertheless, 
in every apiary will be found some stocks 
which, from want of strength or late swarm- 
ing, or other cause, are very short of stores. 
When this is the case it will pay well to feed 
freely, and encourage a little late breeding, so 
as to have plenty of young bees to begin the 
Winter with. If stocks are found really weak, 
as well as short of stores, uniting will be the 
proper course to pursue, and try and have 
most of your stocks, with bees enough to cover 
five frames thoroughly, before the middle of 
May. The success of next season depends 
very much upon preparations in April and 
May. Where queens are old, or have been 
producing an inordinate quantity of drones, 
they should be superseded not later than early 
in May, and young queens introduced. When 
the Spring honey season commences, instead 
of having weak stocks, which occupy all the 
first part of the season in getting up to working 
strength, we shall have our hives running 
over with bees, and ready to store in supers 
at once. The same principles as are followed 
in rearing other stock, must be observed iu 
apiculture — good strain, young and v : gorous 
mothers, and avoidance of in-an l-in breeding. 
This matter of superseding old or damaged 
queens, or queens that have proved unsatis- 
factory, is one of the keys to success in apicul- 
ture, and should not be neglected in April if 
we want a lively start in Spring. 
With frame hives it will be best lo remove 
all frames with no brood, and not covered by 
the bees, and put in a division board, so as to 
contract the hive to just the number of frames 
the bees will cover comfortably, and not allow 
10, 1888. [Price 6d. 
| them too much range over a lot of empty 
combs. The combs removed should be care- 
; fully put away for the Spring, when they will 
j be found very useful to return to the hives as 
! the bees increase. Make provision for feeding 
during the Winter months if necessary, and to 
ascertain if it be necessary, weighing the hives 
from time to time, as described on page 20, is 
a good plan. Of course, one can see by lifting 
out the frames whether the bees have sufficient 
stores or not, but we are convinced that the 
less our hives are opened, even during our 
mild winters, the better it is. Last year we 
weighed our hives about the middle of April, 
and repeated it every month, feeding only 
where the weight showed that there was less 
than 5 or 6-lbs. of food. 
As to the matter of food at this season, we 
would say a few words. It has been strongly 
advocated in these pages that nothing but 
honey should be fed to bees, and we quite 
agree to this on one condition, that we are 
quite certain that the honey we use does not 
come from diseased colonies — and, it appears, 
we cannot be sure of this unless the honey 
comes from our own apiary, and that itself is 
clean and healthy. We certainly can buy 
cheap honey, and boil it to destroy any germs 
of disease it may contain ; but honey that has 
been boiled is no more nor less than syrup, all 
its aroma, formic acid, essential oils, and other 
volatile constituents have evaporated. Sugar 
syrup, converted into nncrystallisable or grape 
sugar syrup, is therefore a clean and safe 
substitute, and one that is used by all the 
owners of large apiaries in England, Canada, 
and America. It must be remembered we 
speak of feeding to keep the bees from starv- 
ing, not feeding to fill sections, or frames for 
extracting. 
Plain sugar syrup is very apt to crystallise 
in the cells of the combs, it is best, therefore, 
to convert the sugar from cane sugar to grape 
sugar. This can easily be done in several 
