Part 2

Querist says--“Mr. Seay has much to say about brood chilling.” This is true, and I have still more to say about it. It is this--it is brood just hatched, or not more than four days old, that is so easily chilled. This brood is very hard to see in the cells, and bee-keepers are not looking for it to be chilled; but when it becomes so and is lost, without having been seen in that state by the inattentive observer, its destruction is not the less attributable to that cause. Querist says where he lives, “sealed brood is not very likely to become chilled during June and July--the swarming months, and but few bees are necessary to keep it at the proper temperature to mature.” We do not know where Querist lives, but we do know that in Iowa in the months of July and August, on replacing our frames after handling them for some time, when the temperature was rather low for those months, we have frequently designated the place in the combs where young brood existed, by piercing the combs in a circle around it, with short stems of timothy grass, and left them there for a day or two that I might be sure to find the exact place and cells again; and, in many cases, on re-examination, I found no brood in those cells. I have repeatedly made swarms in the Langstroth hive, and afterwards found that the brood, in what I call the first stage, was gone.

J. W. SEAY.

_Monroe, Iowa._

[For the American Bee Journal.]

Report of Apiary in 1870.

THE FIELD. The farmers cultivate their fields for produce for the city. They are so frequently broken up that white clover has a poor opportunity for an abundant crop. But little buckwheat is sown. This season none of any consequence within three miles. Fruit blossoms in the spring were unusually abundant.

THE SEASON. The early part of the season was favorable for gathering honey. The breeding apartment of the hives was well stored with brood and honey at the commencement of the white clover harvest. This harvest was, however, shortened by the drouth, and no honey was stored in boxes after the middle of July; and in some cases honey was removed from boxes partly filled.

NUMBER OF COLONIES. I set upon the stand in the spring twenty-three colonies. Of these, three were in old box hives which were broken up when they cast the first swarm, and the hives converted to kindling wood. One of the remaining twenty, from loss of queen or other cause, failed entirely; and a new swarm was introduced to occupy its place. This left nineteen of the old colonies, for giving swarms and surplus honey.

SURPLUS HONEY IN BOXES. I find on adding up the product from my hives, they have given me one thousand and eighty (1,080) pounds of surplus. Perhaps in an ordinary field and poor season I should be content with this; but I think, with the experience of this season and some improvements in my hives, I could do better tried over again.

Of this 1,080 (or to be exact, 1,080½) pounds, five colonies give 625½ pounds, an average of 125 lbs., and 74¾ lbs. more than half of the whole surplus. One of the five best gave one hundred and ninety-eight and a half (198½) pounds.

I attribute this success of my best colonies to the following causes:

1. A full force of workers at the commencement of the season. To secure this, I fed them two or three pounds of syrup, when first placed upon the stand early in March.

2. This gave them from one to three weeks start of the others, in commencing work in the surplus boxes.

3. I think, further, one cause of such force of workers was a most prolific queen. Twelve boxes of six pounds capacity are now almost full of bees, though without honey or comb, except one or two.

4. But this great number of workers, and early filling the hives with bees, would not have given the surplus had they not been satisfied not to swarm. With the purpose to swarm and preparation for it, they would have given an early swarm, followed by one, two, or three after-swarms probably; and the 198 lbs. of surplus have been placed in other hives in the shape of arrangements and stores for wintering one, two, or three new colonies of bees.

In my experiments with bees, I have generally found a loss of two weeks time in preparation for swarming, in which little or no surplus honey is stored--the great body of the workers clustering out in idleness. Or if boxes were furnished them and filled with bees, I have been disappointed on the swarm leaving the box empty of bees, to find it entirely destitute of honey.

Although my advanced age and infirmities moderate my ambition in the new business of bee-keeping, and so limit my experiments that I have never tried to increase my stock by artificial swarming, I have no doubt but the greatest success in the business can only be secured by the use of non-swarming hives and artificial swarming. Overstocking the honey-field is, in my settled conviction, the great obstacle in the way of satisfactory success. This makes it necessary to have the entire control of the increase of colonies, to limit their number to the capacity of the field. I hope to do better another season, from knowledge gained by the experiments of the past.

JASPER HAZEN.

_Albany, N.Y._, Aug. 12, 1870.

[For the American Bee Journal.]

Four-Banded Bees.

Mr. Alley says, in the last number of the Journal, that Mr. Briggs “may bet a high figure that no worker bee in this country ever showed four bands.” I beg respectfully to differ from him, having a queen now in my possession which produces bees that plainly show _four_ bands, when filled with honey.

I noticed this before seeing anything about four banded Italians, in any publication. It is true, that the Baroness Von Berlepsch wrote me early in the spring that Dzierzon was selling such queens, but that was the only time that I had heard of them. The queen mentioned above was raised by me last season, and is not purely fertilized, as many of her bees show only _one_ band.

DANIEL M. WORTHINGTON.

_St. Dennis, Md._, Sept. 5, 1870.

* * * * *

A bee-hive is a school of loyalty and filial love.

[For the American Bee Journal.]

Novice.

DEAR BEE JOURNAL:--Just hear the good news,--our bees are again at work! Not, indeed, at the rate of ten or fifteen pounds per day, as in June last; but they are really at work at this date, September 9th.

We had been building some more “air castles,” and had talked of another yield of honey in August and September. After waiting some time, and watching and weighing a hive without any increase, we at last began to perceive a gain in weight, first of half a pound, then a whole one, and yesterday a stock of _Italians_ gained two pounds and a half, which was enough to make us toss up our hat and almost embrace the little yellow pets (with judicious gentleness, of course).

A neighbor says the way we follow the bees across fields and through woods, and delve into the subject and remove obstructions, it is no wonder they get honey if it be on the face of the earth--and perhaps that is so.

But, look here, my dear reader, did you understand us to say that our bees were building _combs_? Not at all; “nary” comb will they build, with a few exceptions, and certainly none in those old-fashioned traps called boxes. It is this way. Where there are empty combs right above the brood, they will fill them with honey; as, for instance, in the upper story of the Langstroth hive. But they seldom put any honey in combs very far to one side; and hives that are full, or nearly so, do not increase in weight at all. So you see it all depends on having plenty of _empty_ combs. We really think a few more just now would be worth a dollar apiece to us. A little feeding given just right will induce comb building, but _we_ think not so as to pay.

The one stock that we weighed all through the season has now given us three hundred and thirty (330) pounds; and had it not been for replacing their queen, they would have done much better. Their new queen is nearly a black one, and so, also, are her workers; and, by the way, Mr. Editor, here lies a trouble. In slicing the heads off of all our drone brood this summer, we increased our yield of honey, which was all right. But we increased the yield also of new queens that produce black workers, or at least so nearly black that we have resolved to purchase twenty-five pure queens, to replace all that are not fully up to our ideas. It is true we might raise them, but at the prices at which they are now offered, we begin to think we had rather raise honey, and let some one who has more time or likes the bother better, raise queens. In making new swarms we have no trouble; but in raising surplus queens to replace others, etc., we have not made it go to suit us. We have made some experiments in artificial fertilization this fall, but have not succeeded. Queen nurseries and hatching queens in cages have also been an “unsuccessful bother” to us. We know we are but a poor novice, and should not expect to succeed always, but it does seem as if queens that do not lay, are rather a risky property to meddle with.

But there is one thing we do like, and find it a real pleasure, namely, to keep a _record_. Thus, we found sixty-five stocks too many to remember all about, so we got a blank book with 150 pages (bear in mind it is a good idea to have a few extra pages, even if you are sure you _never will_ want to use them). No. 1 hive is on page 1, No. 2 on page 2, and so on to the end of the chapter. Each page tells when the queen of the hive it refers to was hatched, whether pure or not, prolific or not; if weighed, how much honey produced; if queen to be replaced, how and when; and, in short, all about the hive.

Our hives, bees, and combs weigh about thirty pounds each, and before putting them into the house in November, we are going to make every one weigh over fifty pounds, and not more than fifty-five. Some might call twenty five pounds sealed honey (or nearly all sealed) not as well as more; but, as we winter them, we think more would be detrimental, and with us all the rest goes into the melextractor. Were it not for that same melextractor, we fear, or rather _feel sure_, we should not get any surplus honey at all now.

In our last article it read that we had sold all our honey at thirty cents a pound, which was a mistake that crept in somewhere. The honey was sold for thirty cents per pound retail; but the commission, freight, leakage, cost of boxes, labor, etc., made quite a hole in the thirty cents. In regard to saleableness, we have just shipped the last of our three tons, and think that we could sell almost any quantity.

As respects the source of the honey we get now, it is mainly from the same white-flowering plants sent you last fall, which are even thicker here this season than they were then. And, Mr. Editor, we really think that the more bees there are kept, the more honey plants will grow; for every blossom is most surely fertilized, and the result must be more and better seed.

For the first four years that we kept bees, we never found the hives to gain in weight after the first of August; and then we had only from four or five to twenty stocks. Sixty-five colonies is certainly nothing like overstocking, and we have no fear that one hundred would be in any danger if _well taken care of_.

We have found our bees also working so briskly, on what we call fireweed and common golden rod, that we have labelled the honey from

AUTUMN WILD FLOWERS.

It is dark and thick, but has a very pleasant flavor, something like humble-bee honey, as we mentioned last fall, and very different from either clover or basswood honey.

We have had no buckwheat nearer than two and a half miles, and we followed the bees one morning all the way there, as our wild flowers were not then in blossom. We think we can afford, next year, to give farmers within one and a half miles of us, a dollar per acre to raise buckwheat. It is true it might prove a failure, but we are used to failures occasionally.

Many thanks to Mr. Tillinghast, on page 63, and also to yourself, Mr. Editor. When we commenced here with bees, our locality certainly was called poor. Bees had ceased to pay, and were dying out; and had we not been so much discouraged by what bee-keepers told us, we should probably have commenced sooner. One man purchased a hundred stocks, but utterly played out the first year. Black bees are now increasing around us at quite a brisk rate; but that is about all they do.

Mr. Tillinghast says that amount of honey (5,000), in the time, in his locality, “is simply impossible.” We think he would have done better to have said, _in his opinion_. We poor mortals very often have a very imperfect idea of what is possible. After the account was given in our county paper, that our bees were bringing in two hundred pounds of honey per day, and that one stock alone gathered forty-three pounds in three days, it was pronounced utterly impossible; and that if those who told it would consider, they would see that _it could not be_! And we were obliged to invite them publicly to come down and sit by one of our hives all day, weighing it at intervals, if nothing else would convince them, before they were still.

Counting the number of flower heads that a bee visits is a new idea to us; but we cannot think our bees visit more than a dozen certainly. One day in June, when we examined the red clover, we should think a bee would get a fair load from a single blossom; and many of them were working in the red clover at the time. The number stated seems as though the printer had made a mistake with the figures. Nearly ten blossoms in a minute for a whole hour, and not more than a load then! We agree that must be poor pasturage.

Nearly every year since we have kept bees has been called, by more or less unsuccessful ones, the “poorest” season ever known; yet, so far as honey is concerned, all _we_ ask is--more _just like them_.

The only plant we have ever cultivated for bees is the Alsike clover, of which we have about half an acre, sown last spring on the snow, and which has bloomed quite profusely for the last six weeks, but is now nearly gone. We think our bees kept at least one sentinel to the _square foot_ of it, to watch for the honey as it collected.

We had a visitor the other day (in fact, we have visitors by the score, and we are ashamed to say, to our sorrow sometimes). Well, this one for a while did not think proper to inform us whether he kept bees on the “brimstone plan” and came to convince us it was the best way, or whether he was the Editor of the BEE JOURNAL himself (of the latter we were very sure, as we think we should know _him_ anywhere); but eventually he taught us some things, and we hope he learned some things from us. His visit did not last quite twenty-four hours, but he really made us feel quite lonely, for more than that length of time after he was gone. One simple thing, that Gallup has often said before, but we did not believe it, our visitor convinced us of--namely, that rotten wood is ahead of all tobacco, rags, or anything else, for subduing bees, especially hybrids, who will sometimes “fight till death” when tobacco is used, but would turn around and go down between the frames “without ever a word” under the influence of rotten wood smoke. But don’t do as we did next day after he left us, and drop fire into the saw-dust. We burnt up a heavy two-story Langstroth of Italians before we discovered the muss, and the stream of melted wax and smoking honey that ran out in lava-like channels was a warning to all Novices.

And then we had some robbing at OUR house. We got about half a dozen frames of empty comb hastily put in a new hive, and removed the burnt one, and got the bees to bringing in the honey that had run out (they wouldn’t eat melted wax); but before they had got it all done, there arose an “_on_pleasantness” as to _ownership_ that finally mixed itself into a grand jubilee, in spite of Novice. The burnt hive is patched up, and the combs and bees are back into it, minus their queen, about forty pounds of honey, and ten frames of comb of such evenness and beauty, that some one (who wanted to pick a fuss) said we thought more of them than of our wife and family.

Our visitor aforementioned says he has never written but one article on bees, and we think that so richly deserves a place in the Journal, that we mail it to you.

And now, Mr. Editor, we would say before closing, that in our humble opinion, the results we have achieved this year, are no nearer what _may be_ done in scientific bee-culture, than the old brimstone way is to our present method, and humbly beg to be still considered a

NOVICE.

[For the American Bee Journal.]

Bee-Culture in Cities.

MR. EDITOR:--According to promise I will try to answer the queries so often put in the JOURNAL:--“Are bees profitable?” and “Can bees be kept in cities?”

I have kept bees for the last three years on the roof of a two-story house in the city of Cincinnati, having kept bees before, when living on a farm. We did then about as well with them, as our neighbors did who also kept bees; but we were without the aid of the BEE JOURNAL, and kept our bees in common box hives--hence our doings could hardly be called bee-keeping.

Three years ago we took to the city the last hive which the moths had left us, built a platform on the roof of the house, and placed the hive thereon. It threw off a swarm in June following, and gave us some honey. In the fall I introduced an Italian queen in each colony. Two years ago I subscribed for the AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL, and transferred my bees into Langstroth hives. A year ago last spring I entered on the campaign with five colonies of bees--the two Italians in Langstroth hives, and three in Townley hives, having bought the latter. They produced during the season nearly five hundred pounds of honey, all in small frames weighing from one pound to one and a half pounds each; and the fall found me in possession of fifteen strong stands of bees, most of them Italians. On the fourth of June, 1869, I hived two second swarms, clustered together, from two of the Townley hives. After giving them an Italian queen and a full set of empty combs, they produced for me 138 lbs. of honey, the same season.

Last spring I had a first-rate honey slinger made by a brother bee-keeper in this city, and commenced the season with twenty colonies--fourteen of which were Italians or hybrid. As the bees commenced storing honey very early, my expectations were quite flattering, though I did not obtain as much honey as I anticipated. Several mistakes which I happened to make, account for this, in part; but my honey-harvest is respectable still. Here is a statement of it:

384 lbs. of honey in frames. 1,350 ” machine strained honey. 23 ” beeswax.

As beeswax sells at the same price here that honey does, we may count it with the rest, and thus we have 1,757 lbs. as the product of twenty hives of bees in the city of Cincinnati. This certainly speaks well for our Italian bees, and for bee-keeping in a large city. My black bees have done well, but I think my Italians have given me nearly twice as much honey. Every one of my twenty colonies is now strong.

I was induced last month to make four more swarms, by taking from each hive about two frames with brood, honey, and adhering bees, and giving an Italian queen to each swarm. I have thus twenty-four Italian stands of bees, in a No. 1 condition.

Last year I wintered my bees on their summer stands, by leaving the honey board in its proper place and covering it with about half a dozen coffee bags or pieces of old carpet. I placed a smooth bag next to the board, to cover well the openings. This plan did very well. I did not lose a single colony, and intend to winter them the same way this year. In the earlier part of the winter I lost a great many bees, for the reason that I had neglected to cut winter passages through the combs. This having been done afterward, on the first mild day we had, my bees then got along first-rate. Before this was done, I sometimes found hundreds of bees dead in the cells on the outside of combs which separated them from the cluster--showing clearly the necessity of winter passages. Most of those parts of combs had already a putrid smell, and I thought it best to cut them out.

I have seen it stated several times that bees get irritated by tobacco smoke, and are more apt to sting for several days afterwards. This may be true of the black bees. They will bother me sometimes, in spite of my cigar. But I think those assertions are only made by non-smokers. All I want is a cigar, and I will open every one of my hives, take out every frame, and replace it every day for a week successively, without finding my bees any more angry at the end than they were at the beginning.

I learned how to open a hive from Mr. Gallup, through one of the numbers of our BEE JOURNAL. I hardly blow any smoke at the bees, but over them; and I keep my cigar in the mouth, while Mr. Gallup keeps his pan with sawdust by his side, until the proper time arrives for the application of a little smoke. I think there are no more peaceable hives than mine in the country.

Now, Mr. Editor, I do not want to exhaust your patience, and wish you to make use of this, or of such portions only, as you may think proper.

CHARLES F. MUTH.

_Cincinnati, Ohio_, August 16, 1870.

[For the American Bee Journal.]

The Looking Glass Again.

On page 67 of the last number of the BEE JOURNAL, Ignoramus criticises my article on page 34 in regard to the looking glass, and says the glass has been tried three times this year to his knowledge, and three swarms of bees secured. But he gives us the particulars in only one case, and then guesses at my reply, which is perhaps correct; or the swarm may have had two or more young queens, and a small portion with one queen settled on one tree, while two or more queens with the larger portion of the swarm settled on another. After a few minutes, all these latter queens may have been simultaneously killed, and then the bees went to the other tree and joined the small portion with the one queen. As to the bees coming down to the ground, that is often the case. When a swarm issues, the bees are so full of honey that it is difficult for them to fly, and they often light to rest. I have often had swarms to settle in three or four places, though they had but one queen, remain for ten or fifteen minutes, and then all join the cluster with the queen. Just so with the old woman’s bees. They may have just been in the act of going to join the cluster with the queen, when she saw them.

Ignoramus also tells us how to secure swarms with a _knot_. Well, sir, I have never tried the _knot_, but I have tried the _mullein_ tops tied in a bunch and attached to a pole, &c., and also a piece of old black comb attached to the under side of an inverted bottom board swung to a pole, with cord and pulley, to raise and lower, as the bees would rise or fall. But after trying both for a whole season, when I had more than a hundred swarms to issue without a bee lighting on either, I gave it up as a failure. I think it likely his knot theory will answer very well in a prairie country, or any place where there is nothing for the bees to light on. But where they are surrounded with as many shady fruit trees as mine are, they will mostly select a leafy branch to settle on. When I allowed my bees to swarm naturally, I had two-thirds of the swarms, or more, to settle on the under side of my grape arbor; which proves that they prefer a cool shady place to a bare pole with a knot on it.