1874 
GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 
7 
satisfied to recommend sugar in place of 
honey we would advise him to carefully re- 
cord the results of the great number of prac- 
tical experiments made of that kind. 
A remafk made in the A. 13. J. intended to 
express our disapproval of the plan of not giv- 
ing residences of correspondents, perhaps impli- 
ed more than we intended it should, but we con- 
fess to a dislike of finding when we reach the 
end of an article that ‘twas from plain “John 
Smith” with no other earthly clue to his where- 
abouts ; and although we cannot say we feel 
satisfied, ’tis the better way, we must admit 
we have had the subject presented us from a 
standpoint of view we had not heretofore con- 
sidered, and that there are some very cogent 
reasons for withholding the full name and ad- 
dress. We hope we shall never be unwilling j 
to acknowledge an error or injustice when sat- j 
isfied we have committed one, whether it be ! 
commonly considered derogatory to the Edit- , 
orial character or not. 
Filling pieces of comb with syrup as Mr ! 
King advises might have given very good sat- ) 
isfaction in 1868, but we fear our modern Api- ] 
arist would hardly be content with so slow 
and laborious a method ; and does he consider 
too that in selling the Peabody Extractor he 
cucumbers his patrons with a patented machine 
that must be eventually laid aside for the supe- 
rior light running home-made ones? ’Twould 
be idle to argue a point that demonstrates it- 
self so readily by actual experiment. 
We most heartily approve of Mr King’s 
method of furnishing hives of any kind order- 
ed from manufactories close at hand, and we j 
commend the Dec. No. of the Magazine as par- i 
ticularly valuable. 
We were certainly much pleased to receive | 
Mrs. Tapper's Journal for November done up in I 
a style so neat, and with such an attractive j 
cover that we never should have recognized ! 
the old National Bee Journal at all, were it not | 
for the name. We shall have to conclude that 
woman’s taste is certainly equal, if not superior 
to that of the sterner sex, in such matters. 
The typography and general appearance of the 
whole fully agrees with its appearance exter- 
ually, and the whole work certainly does her 
credit. We wish her a large list of sub- 
scribers. Mrs. Topper’s Journal is cer- 
tainly valuable, it could not well be otherwise, j 
and right here we would ask why it can not | 
be railed Mrs. Tapper's Journal , and thus aid In 
making it possible to explain to our friends i 
'bat the National Bee Journal, was a separate 
institution from the National Agriculturist 
and Bee-keepers Journal ofN. Y. 
Mrs. T. says “Novice does not differ so wide- 
ly from other Bee-keepers as he would have us 
suppose,” which we are well aware of, for what 
was considered some of his most extreme views 
a year or two ago are now being echoed in a 
way that would sound very much like some 
who say when forced to concede a point, “why, 
we always said so.” Now Mrs. T. your other 
remark that: “It has always appeared to us 
singular, to say the least, that in no one of our 
bee journals is found mention of another — 
each one ignoring utterly the existence of an- 
other,” was rough on us, for in our opening No. 
we certainly did notice all the Journals, and 
there were more then than now,, and we did 
also notice your own National Journal so well 
that one of the associate Editors wrote “awful 
bad” to us ; if you meant that Gleanings wasn’t 
a Journal we shall feel worse still, for our Feb. 
No. informed you that ’twas constituted a 
Monthly as soon as the first No. was before 
the public. 
If Adair's theory that bees breathe- through 
their wings be true, and that “a queen with a 
clipped wing is like a man who still lives 
though a part of his lungs be gone,” how' will 
he explain the fact of queen’s living and thri- 
ving with no wings ? Is it possible in his expe- 
rience ’practically, helms seen no such? We 
remember one of our best queens, in fact the 
mother of the colony that gave us the 330 lbs. 
in a season, had both wings gnawed otf close, 
probably in being introduced, anil she was 
equally prolific for two seasons at least. 
Queens two or three years old are frequently 
almost destitute of wings. Our opinion of 
conventions was mainly intended for those 
who had not made bee-keeping profitable, and 
we have no reason yet to change our decision, 
that those who make their bees mbs! profitable 
are not those who are fdfemost a-i .our large 
conventions. Mrs. Tupper’s report- of the North 
American Society certainly contains much of 
value, and we tender her our thanks for giving 
it to the people in a correct and valuable shape, 
but we arc pained to find that she again insists 
that Extracting injures the brood, totally Ig- 
noring the mass of evidence from those who 
have for years been in the habit of extracting 
honey by the ton. If conventions are to be 
valuable they should embody at least enough 
practical bee-keepers to keep down Adair’s 
folly, and Mrs. Tupper’s inexperience with the 
extractor. 
It may be well to add that ’tis only necessary 
to clip a very small portion (to avoid marring 
their beauty) of one wing of the queen to pre- 
vent loss in swarming; we have lately been 
informed that Adam Grim clips the wings of 
his queens in his whole Apiary of nearly 1000 
colonics. 
