34 
AMERICAN AGRICULTURIST. 
[January, 
Bee Notes for January. 
BY L. C. ROOT. 
The bees being now snugly in winter quarters, as 
previously directed, we may omit any special sug- 
Fig. 1.— A CENTRIFUGAL HONEY EXTRACTOR. 
gestions for the care of the bees this month, and 
briefly review a most interesting subject, viz: 
Progress in Bee Culture. 
A short time before his death, in 1875, Mr. 
Quinby (who conducted these Notes for so many 
years), said : “ More progress has 
been made in beekeeping during 
five years past, than during forty 
previous years, and I predict that 
during the five years to come', 
progress will be even greater.” 
Let us briefly note some steps 
in this progress. Until about 
1869, most of the bees through¬ 
out the country were in box 
hives. Although the Rev. Mr. 
Uangstroth had invented the 
movable comb hive about 1850, 
only a few of the most enter¬ 
prising beekeepers adopted it. 
With the box hives the surplus 
•comb-honey was mostly secured 
in boxes holding from 4 to 12 lbs. 
liquid honey was obtained by killing the bees with 
brimstone, crushing the combs, with the bee-bread, 
■dead bees, and draining. The dark colored mixture 
thus obtained was marketed as “ strained honey.” 
The Honey Extractor, fig. 1, for throwing honey 
from the combs by centrifugal force, invented by 
Hen - Van Hruschka, of Germany, was a grand step 
in advance, and made the use of movable combs a 
necessity, as the Extractor was useless without 
them. I remember the extreme delight Mr. 
Quinby manifested when the words “ centrifugal 
force,’’coming 
from our Ger¬ 
man friend, 
solved this dif¬ 
ficult problem 
for us. A 
square boxwas 
at once made, 
and with the 
gearing of an 
•old fanning mill, a reel was arranged within the box, 
■and the honey successfully thrown from the combs 
without injuring them in the slightest degree. 
I al 60 recall the difficulties in marketing this 
superior quality of honey. It was a new thing. 
June honey, with no crushed bees or pollen to give 
it the familiar color. When candied it was nearly 
as white as lard, and as unlike the old style of 
strained honey as whitest syrups are unlike the 
.poorest molasses. Customers did not know it, and 
when we sent it to the New York market, the 
poorest grades, which were darker, sold best. But 
the taste of consumers has become educated, and 
the best grades of liquid honey are now sought. 
About the same time there was a revolution in 
the style of surplus boxes, and instead of those 
with two to eight combs, the single comb section 
boxes have been generally adopted. In adopting 
the single-comb boxes it was difficult at first to 
cause the bees to build the combs straight in the 
frames, and to prevent their building too much 
drone comb. These difficulties were at last over¬ 
come by the introduction of comb foundation, a 
card of which is shown in a frame, in fig. 2.’ This 
foundation is made by running thin sheets of wax 
between indented rollers, which give it the exact 
form of the base, and starters of sidewalls of worker 
comb. Figure 3 shows a machine for this purpose. 
It is not possible to state in this article the many 
advantages resulting from this invention, or even to 
enumerate the minor improvements, or to describe 
the progress made in handling bees. Probably 
nothing has done so much in this direction as the 
Bellows Bee Smoker, fig. 4, which was one of Mr. 
Quinby’s last inventions, and has been generally 
adopted. The beneficial results of the introduc¬ 
tion of the Italian bee cannot be over-estimated. 
The recent efforts of Mr. D. A. Jones, of Canada, 
in introducing the Cyprian and Holy Land bees, 
should be appreciated by all interested in bee¬ 
keeping, but their value is yet to be determined. 
If asked “ What are the practical results of all 
these improvements ?” I 6hall be far within the 
reality if I say that at this time we are enabled to 
secure double the amount of honey from each 
swarm. The average amount of honey from the 
box hives was very limited. Reports have been 
given from time to time in these Notes of the yield 
of honey from three hives during the season just 
finished. We give their total yield as follows: 
No. 1 gave of Fall Honey, 34-X lbo. Total for Season, 2l4k lbs. 
“ 2 23M lbs.l •* “ “ 212 lbs. 
3 35>$ lbs.l “ “ ** 264X lbs. 
These figures show in a measure the possibilities 
of the present system ; in a more favorable season 
Fig. 3.— MACHINE FOR MAKING COMB FOUNDATION. 
the yield from these swarms would doubtless 
have been largely increased, if Dot doubled. 
How was Your Letter Lost? 
Nobody means to be careless; few will acknowl¬ 
edge themselves so, until it is positively proved. 
Yet there must be a great many such, even among 
those intelligent people who write letters, as wit¬ 
ness : Of the 866,593,572 letters mailed in the United 
States during the last official year, 3,057,141 went to 
to the Dead Letter Office, or one in every 283! 
despite the fact that more than half of all the let¬ 
ters mailed contained the address of the sender, 
so that they were returned instead of going to the 
Dead Letter Office. At this ratio, of say 135,000 let¬ 
ters intended to be sent to the American Agricultui'ist 
Office, 477 would have gone to Washington. But 
2,560,402 of the Dead Letter letters were those “ un¬ 
called for,” leaving about half a million (497,739) 
defective from other causes, thus: 284,503 were 
put into the post offices without postage stamps ; 
201,899 were lacking in proper direction; and 
(gir*9,167 bore no superscription whatever—either 
to tell who from or who for ! Surely 497,739 de¬ 
fective letters show carelessness. Of those sent 
to the Dead Letter Office 21,974 contained notes, 
checks, and drafts, amounting to $1,526,217, and 
27,000 other letters enclosed $49,438 in money. But 
we believe our subscribers and correspondents, as a 
class, are unusually intelligent and careful, and the 
facts confirm this belief, as few letters directed to 
this office are lost. There have been a few, how¬ 
ever, and these cases the above facts and figures 
will doubtless explain. We desire to add, that of 
the letters received, very frequently the writers 
omit to give their names or post offices, and still 
more frequently omit to name their State, a very 
troublesome matter when there are 43 Washingtons, 
30 Lincolns, 25 Jeffersons, 25 Springfields, 24 Madi¬ 
sons, 23 Jacksons, 20 Summits, 13 Centers, and 114 
Centers with a suffix, etc , etc. That some of our 
people are careless is well shown by several in¬ 
stances, of which we will name two, for example; 
First , We received a subscription letter, for one 
year, from a bank cashier, containing over $30,000 
in checks, drafts, etc. The bank for which the 
enclosure was intended received a letter containing 
$1.50! Second, A correspondent sent us a remit¬ 
tance, not giving his own name or address. Two 
weeks after a letter in the same handwriting scolded 
us roundly for inattention, and the second letter 
was unsigned ! In neither case does the envelope 
show where the letter came from ! 
Interesting- Postal Items. 
During the past official year there were put into 
the U. S. Mails over 2,215 million pieces, viz.: 
Sealed letters.866,51)3.512 Magazines. 53,472,276 
Postal cards.276,446,716 Merchandise articles 2'2;634,456 
Newspapers.695,115,624 - 
Books, circ’lars, &C.300,845,480 Total.2,215,168,124 
(Such aggregate figures are not readily ap¬ 
prehended in detail. To count them one by 
one, 20 a minute, 10 hours a day, 300 days 
in a year, would take a person over 615 years ?) 
.... The public mail routes of the United 
States aggregate 343,888 miles, or equal to 13 times 
around the world. Of these routes the Railroads 
occupy 85,220 miles; Steamboats, 23,320 miles; 
Stages, etc., 235,248 miles. The total distance the 
mails were carried on these routes amounted for the 
year to 178,227,000 miles, equal to over 7,000 trips 
around the world, or 370 trips to the moon and 
back, or nearly a trip to the sun and back. The 
Railroads took 96,497,463 miles of the mail travel, 
the Steamboats, 5,668,578, and other routes, 
76,070,995 miles. . . . There are 60,479 employees 
of the United States engaged in handling the mails, 
' including 42,989 postmasters. . . . Money orders 
numbering 7,461,909, amounting to $101,012,235, 
were iksued during the year. The Money Orders 
sent to and received from other countries were : 
Sent to Ao. Amount. Rec'dfrom. Amount . 
Great Britain. 116.773 $1,625,943 18,912 $338,095 
Germany. 63,885 1,014,462 22.6r>5 637,15( 
Italy . 6,935 167.854 450 13,.91 
Switzerland. 7.603 130,602 2,710 *8-602 
Canada, etc. 25,085 511,617 23,213 422,;80 
France (3 months). 823 13,386 210 5,104 
The grandest features of the mail system is the 
“ Universal Postal Union,” which began only 5i 
