August, i 9 * 7 
51 
BREAKING 
I N T O ' B E' E'V'K ' E E P I N G 
Pertinent Pointers Which Will Enable You to Enjoy that Great 
American Delicacy — Hot Biscuits with Horn f?-,Grown Honey 
benjamin Wallace’ • .d’o"’ug-l ass • 
ADAM and Eve knew the taste of 
A\ honey. It doesn’t say so in the 
Bible—at least I don’t think it says 
so—but I know that it must be true be¬ 
cause that first garden was perfect; and 
no garden would be perfect without the 
amber spoils of. the honey gatherers. 
Anyhow, we know that honey as an 
article of food was famous long before 
the discovery of Battle Creek, and it re¬ 
mains today in good repute in spite of the 
pure food chemists. Some of the old 
prophets, used to drift out into the desert 
and go on a regular wild locusts and honey 
debauch—or was it locusts and wild 
honey? It must have been wild honey be¬ 
cause in that day and age tame honey 
was practically unknown, owing to the 
fact that not much progress had been 
made in the art of keeping bees. 
It is interesting to note that although 
bees and their products have been more or 
less familiar to men for countless cen¬ 
turies, there was practically no progress 
in beekeeping methods until after the 
perfection of the great American biscuit. 
By “biscuit” I mean a biscuit, not a 
cracker—one of those delicious products 
of the oven condemned by all food cranks 
and enjoyed by all others. Hot biscuits 
and honey. Something real to live for! 
Buying the Bees and Hives 
I wanted honey on my biscuits, and so I 
became a beekeeper. I could buy honey, 
of course, but that would not do. I wanted 
my own particular product and I proceeded 
to get it. First of all 1 had to have bees, 
and the easiest, though perhaps not the 
best, way to get a start was to buy a few 
colonies from a local beekeeper. We made 
several trips into the country in search of 
bees that could be bought at a reasonable 
price and finally found an interesting old 
chap who would part with a few colonies. 
We examined his bees carefully, and 
found that while they were housed in the 
most primitive sort of makeshift hives, 
they , were strong in numbers and appar¬ 
ently free from any bee disease—two ex¬ 
tremely important considerations. 
Our bees now had to be transferred 
from the old hives in which we obtained 
them to clean new hives fresh from the 
factory. Even before removing them came 
the job of putting the new hives together. 
If you have never seen beehives in the 
making you cannot appreciate what com¬ 
plicated affairs they are. 
When I ordered mine I wanted to save 
as much expense as possible and so bought 
hives in the “K.D.” (knocked down) 
form. “Knocked down” is a good ex¬ 
pression. That is exactly the way I felt 
when I opened the crate. One or two of 
the hive bodies had been nailed together 
and these contained the three other bodies 
in the set of five, besides all the internal 
arrangements of the entire set. When I 
opened that first crate and tried to get the 
pieces together I felt as though someone 
had sprung a new form of puzzle on me, 
but at last I discovered a little slip of 
paper telling just how to nail the big piece 
on to the little piece and just how many 
nails of just what size to put just where. 
(The nails were all in the package, too.) 
I would sit down in the basement even¬ 
ings nailing the things together, and the 
neighbor’s boy used to come over and 
watch me work. He was a critic—a 
natural-born critic. It got to be a regular 
sing-song with him:—“That one went in¬ 
side; that one went outside; that one went 
inside.” _ But at last I got all the nails 
driven in their proper places and had 
my bee houses ready for their occupants. 
I had handled bees before, and as an 
entomologist I knew a good deal about 
them from a technical standpoint; but I 
had never even seen a colony on an old 
Gentle bees — yes, there are such things—may 
he handled without protecting veil or smoke 
In the central part of the comb the bees are 
hatched. The rest is for stoi'ing food supplies 
log transferred to a new hive and so I 
called in a real expert in the business to 
give me the advantage of his experience. 
This man knew bees by instinct. His 
people had kept bees before he was born, 
and it was almost second nature with him 
to handle the touchy insects with uncanny 
skill. With the new hive ready he could 
split open an old “bee gum” (a section of 
a hollow log) with an axe. He was not 
more concerned about it than he would be 
about splitting a lot of kindling. 
When a Bee Won’t Sting 
I afterwards found out that in some 
cases rough treatment will result in fewer 
stings to the operator than very careful 
handling. As soon as the bees find that they 
are being assailed their instinct teaches 
them to save as much of the honey store 
as possible, and each and every one of them 
falls to and gets a load of honey. A bee 
with his honey pouch loaded to the guards 
has very seldom been known to sting. 
Inside the old logs and box hives the 
combs are built side by side very much 
as they are in any hive. My assistant 
cut off these old combs one at a time and, 
selecting the best, cut them to fit roughly 
into the frames which support the brood 
combs in the modern hive. As each comb 
was fitted into its frame we tied strings 
around and around the frames to hold 
the comb in place. Later the bees glued 
the frames solid and chewed the cotton 
strings to bits and removed them from the 
hive in a very cooperative manner. 
After seeing it done I did not consider 
that transferring was such a formidable 
job as 1 had supposed, and since that initial 
time I have transferred many colonies to 
new hives and have seldom been stung. 
It might be asked why we bothered to 
move the old comb. Why not shake the 
bees into the new hives and let them start 
all over again? That could be done, of 
course, but the bees might not stay in the 
empty hive; and even if they did they 
would have to work pretty hard to replace 
all the old comb with its many cells of 
young brood and its store of honey. These 
brood combs, be it remembered, remain 
in the hive year after year. They are 
never taken away unless for some special 
reason, and never to supply honey as 
human food. Honey stored in a brood 
comb would be unfit to eat, as such combs 
have been used as places to rear the young 
through many bee generations. Conse¬ 
quently the combs from an old box hive, 
if they are fairly straight and do not con¬ 
tain too much drone comb, are every bit 
as good as the new combs which the bees 
would gradually build later on. 
Cells of Various Sizes 
Perhaps I should explain here that 
drones, workers and queens are all pro¬ 
duced in cells of a different size. The 
queens are produced in special large, elon¬ 
gated cells built out from the main comb. 
These cells hang down almost at right 
angles to the other cells in the hive. They 
are built only as needed, and only during 
the spring and early summer, when the 
natural tendency of the colony is to 
swarm and so establish a new colony. 
The workers are produced in cells of rela¬ 
tively small size. Drone cells are quite a 
little larger than the cells in the worker 
comb. It is desirable to have a colony 
produce as many workers as possible and 
for that reason an excess of drone comb 
is always highly objectionable. 
We got our bees well established in the 
new hives quite early in the spring— 
just about the time the apples were in 
bloom. At that time the bees can be 
handled better than they can earlier. It 
is unwise to attempt to handle them at 
any time when they are not gathering 
