Part 6

TRENTON, ILLS., Sept. 12, 1870.--The forepart of this season I think was the poorest I ever saw in this neighborhood. Last winter was a very warm and open one, and the bees dwindled down very much, so that nearly all stocks were quite weak before spring. Then we had a severe snow storm on the 17th of April, with two or three freezing nights, that killed nearly all the peach blossoms; and this was followed by a period of cold high winds through May. The first two weeks of June there was cloudy, drizzling, chilly weather, so that bees could not fly more than about half the time. The consequence of all this was, late swarms and very few of them. Not more than one-sixth of the stocks swarmed, and many of the latest of them starved. It was very dry from the middle of June to the 13th of August. Then, for a week, it rained nearly every day; at the end of which some of my hives had not more than a pound of honey remaining. Since that time they have been doing very well. Most of my hives were filled up, so that they commenced working in the surplus boxes about the middle of last week, and some of them have now as much as fifteen pounds in the boxes.

I would like NOVICE to tell us how he gets his board and frame into the top of his hive, if his hives are all of one size. I have a few of the two-story hives made by the National Bee-hive Company at St. Charles, Illinois, and I cannot get a frame into the top story in any other way than perpendicular, as the top bar of the frame is longer than the inside of the hive. I have tried one to see how it would work.--C. T. SMITH.

DOWAGIAC, MICH., Sept. 12--We have had just half a surplus honey harvest, here, this season. Since I have been in the bee business, I have learned that the surplus harvest depends entirely upon the clover and basswood blossoms, in this vicinity; which is probably the case all over the State. When we have a wet season clover fails, but basswood produces well; and when a dry season, _vice versa_. Reverses from abundance to starvation take place within a few miles of each other. I am located now in the midst of clover and basswood, together with the best spring and fall pasturage I have ever seen. After losing seven-eighths of my bees last winter, you can easily guess the condition of the remaining six colonies. Four of them were merely skeletons, and the other two very inferior stocks. Yet, with the aid of a three cent feeder of my own invention, (which works to perfection,) and one and a fourth dollar’s worth of sugar, I have succeeded in marketing five hundred and twenty-three (523) pounds of box honey; and with the aid of old combs have increased my stock to twenty-two (22) colonies, all strong and heavy--too heavy I fear, for their own good; and I have as yet no emptying machine. This, I think, is doing very well (see Langstroth’s “HIVE AND HONEY BEE,” page 177) for a bee-keeper of only two years’ experience.--I came near forgetting to mention that I have Italianized all my new stocks. I use top-bar hives mostly. Am using four or five frame hives on the sly!--J. HEDDON.

WINCHESTER, IOWA, Sept. 13.--The season of 1870 has not been any of the best here, nor of the poorest either, as swarming and honey gathering has been moderately good. The American Bee Journal well deserves the support of bee-keepers.--I. N. WALTER.

ROCHELLE, ILLS., Sept. 17.--This has been the poorest season that we have had here for some years. I got only five new swarms from forty stands, and merely one hundred pounds of honey. Since the buckwheat came into blossom the bees have done well. They will average about fifty pounds to the stand; and that is doing very well, in such a year as this has been. Alsike clover is now in blossom, and the bees are working very busily on it.--R. MILLER.

BREESPORT, N. Y., Sept. 20.--My bees have done well in gathering honey, this season; but gave me no swarms during swarming time.--J. H. HADSELL.

OSKALOOSA, IOWA, Sept. 28.--I have one hundred and ninety colonies of bees that have done well this year, and are in fine condition for winter. I stored away one hundred and twenty-nine colonies in my cellar last fall, and the same number came out in good order in the spring. I sold them off to about one hundred, from which I came on to winter with the above number (190), principally Italians.

Enclosed please find specimen of a bee plant. What is it? It blooms from first of July to last of August profusely and is visited by bees thrice as much as buckwheat. I have tried borage, melilot, alsike, mustard, and find nothing to equal it. I calculate to cultivate it, in order to give it a fair and full trial. I have secured about a peck of seed. The great advantage is that it blooms at a time when most needed in this country. I grew it this year alongside of buckwheat that bloomed at the same time.--S. INGELS.

[The plant enclosed is the _Cassia chamæcrista_ or Partridge Pea. It is an annual, growing in most sandy soil, and is common in the south. It grows here on the eastern branch of the Potomac (the Anacostia), and bees derive plentiful supplies of forage from it during eight or ten weeks in summer, and it is then almost their only resource. They gather pollen from the blossoms, but the honey is secreted by a small cupshaped gland situated below the lowest pair of leaflets, and is supplied abundantly for a long period.--Some of the farmer’s here-abouts affect to consider it a pernicious and ineradicable weed; but as it is an annual and known to be an excellent fertilizer when plowed under, it would seem to indicate slovenly management not to be able to subdue it readily where not wanted.--ED.]

VERVILLA, TENN., Sept. 24.--I consider the Journal cheap at any price for the bee-keeper, and wish it could be published oftener.--DR. J. M. BELL.

WARSAW, MINN., Oct. 3.--This has been a poor season for bees here, except in basswood time.--L. B. ALDRICH.

CEDARVILLE, ILLS., Oct. 5.--My bees have done well this season.--ROBERT JONES.

MEREDITH, PA., Oct. 4.--Bees did very well on white clover in this section this season, but very poorly on buckwheat. My sixty stocks did not give me sixty pounds of buckwheat honey surplus, all told; although they are all in good condition for wintering.

I do not think that alsike clover has been over-estimated for bee pasturage. I had three-quarters of an acre of it this season, and I never saw a piece of land so covered with bees as that was while it was in bloom, and they gathered honey from it very fast.--M. WILSON.

ORCHARD, IOWA, Oct. 6.--It is raining heavily to-day, yet the weather is warm and we have not had a particle of frost yet. Bees have done storing surplus honey for the season.--I shall give the result of the season’s operations as soon as I can get the time. At present I am up 4 A. M., and do not get home till 8 and sometimes 9 o’clock P. M. I must have a little relaxation from such excessive hard labor, before I can confine or control my thoughts sufficiently to write for publication. From the past season’s operations with the honey extractor, I can endorse all that Novice claims over and above the old mode of getting surplus in the comb--E. GALLUP.

NEW BEDFORD, MASS., Oct. 6.--The season for bees has been remarkable. Commencing well, the dry weather soon made forage very scarce during the blooming of clover and basswood, so that by the first of September there was little or no surplus stored, and all the colonies were very light. But during that month, mostly after the fifteenth, the bees gathered honey as fast or faster than they ever do in this locality in June. It was obtained from the wild aster; and the stocks are now heavy and in fine condition for winter. Even now there seems to be no cessation of their labors. This is true of all the neighboring towns; nearly every hive in them having been examined by me during my professional drives.--E. P. ABBE.

[For The American Bee Journal.]

How May Progress be Taught?

MR. EDITOR:--As the columns of the Bee Journal are made the medium of disseminating apicultural knowledge, by asking and answering questions, I have this question to ask in reference to the class of bee-keepers who use box and gum exclusively. How shall we reach these, and dispense the necessary knowledge among them? Let us endeavor to devise some effective means. Your Journal is doing the work as far as they can be induced to take and study it; but the number is comparatively limited. Many of these people, when they see an improved bee-hive, unconsciously exclaim to the owner, who happens to be a practical bee-keeper:

“Mr. B.--What do you call that?”

B. “That, sir, is a bee-hive.”

Q. “What do you have so many sticks in it for?”

B. “Those are what we call _frames_ for the bees to build their combs on; each frame separately giving them the means by which the combs may be removed from the hive, for the purpose of making artificial swarms, furnishing honey from the rich to the poor colonies and strengthening weak ones.”

Here the querist exclaims in perfect amazement: “What will the bees be doing while you are lifting their combs out?”

B. “If you treat the bees right they will not harm you; besides we can have a protection, made of wire cloth, or what is more handy, a piece of bobbinet to place over the face; and by keeping the hands wet, the bees will not sting, unless they are badly treated.”

Q. “What a fool I have been. I have kept bees all my life, and never before knew what I needed. I suppose if you can lift out the combs, as you say you can, you could find the king’s house and perhaps the king himself?”

B. “There is no such bee in the hive.”

Q. “What! no king bee! Why I always understood that a colony of bees without a king and ruler, whose mandates are strictly obeyed, will not be worth anything.”

B. “The bee you allude to is the mother of the colony and is called the queen; but she has no house or particular spot in the hive in which she dwells. The worker-bees, however, construct what are called queen-cells, in which queens are reared; but they never remain in them, except only while in embryo.”

Q. “Why, Mr. B., you seem to know as much about bees as the man I heard a neighbor speak of. He said there was a man living in Iowa that reared king bees (perhaps you would call them queen bees) of a superior and different kind from the common bee, and brought from some other country.”

B. “Yes, we rear our own queens, or in other words we cause the bees to do so, by our artificial process. This we do for the purpose of furnishing fertilized queens to old stocks, when their queens are taken away, as is the case in producing artificial swarms.”

Q. “Then you can make bees swarm, and rear queens at your will?”

B. “Yes.”

Q. “But do you never find a hive that is not in the notion of swarming? I always thought that bees knew when they wanted to swarm, better than man did.”

B. “Bees have only instinct, and were not intended in the beginning to produce their own swarms. They were created for the benefit of man, and if that had been the way swarms were intended to be made, they would be made in conformity with natural laws that govern them, and swarming would always be successfully performed in perfection. Man was given knowledge, by means of which it was intended he should manage his bees in his own way, independent of any will they may have. The penalty for man’s neglect in this respect is the loss of his bees in various ways--such as swarming and departing to parts unknown, loss of queen, extermination by robbing, &c. Man, therefore, endowed with knowledge and judgment, knows more of the management, for his benefit, of the internal parts of the hive, than the bees, with mere instinct, can possibly know.”

Q. “I perceive, sir, that these are the days of our ignorance spoken of in Holy Writ, though I was never able to see it till now. Some of my neighbors, a few years ago, purchased bees which were in common boxes and gums. They brought them home and set them down in a remote corner of the yard or garden, to live or die, as they might or could, with no attention whatever, except when the time came to secure some of their delicious stores, which, with shame I confess, is the practice in all the neighborhood now.”

B. “Your statement is only too true, if indeed the facts are not worse.”

This is a fair specimen of the questions asked by common bee-keepers.

While the inventive genius of the age has given power to water in the form of steam, causing the face of the earth to be alive with machinery and wheels that are almost daily circumscribing its surface at lightning speed--yea, the lightning itself has, as it were, been snatched from the heavens and made to do the bidding of man--yet the bee-hive, till within the last fifteen years, has in a measure remained as it may have been in the garden of Eden. The invention of the frames was the dawn of a new era in bee-keeping, by means of which we have advanced step by step up the hill of science to the present advanced stage, while progression still looms up and fades away in the distance. The mysteries of the hive that remained hidden from the beginning till now, are, many of them, solved and being solved, and all the various causes of the destruction of colonies plainly disclosed. The practical man, properly informing himself, need not lose a hive; while, in the old way, twenty-five per cent, of all the bees kept in the country are lost every year. While we have reached these advances, there are many things yet in embryo, that will be reached by and by--such as the control of fertilization, which enables the bee-keeper to select both queens and drones, and secure the purity of the race we prefer to cultivate. We also expect a forcing-box, hiver, and swarmer, all combined; and means which will enable the bee-keeper to compel a plurality of queens in every colony, without division, in the same apartment.

But I am wandering from my purpose, which was simply to start the inquiry--how shall we reach, and dispense the necessary knowledge among those who still keep their bees in unimproved hives? The State governments should foster bee culture as they foster other agricultural pursuits. Why not have a separate department for bee culture in every State, under the charge of a man qualified to superintend it and diffuse its advantages in the community? In some of the German States the number of hives will average hundreds to the square mile, and that too in soil comparatively sterile. How was this brought about? Simply by encouraging and fostering the business. And cannot the American States produce the same results? Millions of barrels of honey go to waste annually in this country, merely from the want of bees to gather the nectar of flowers. What, say you, bee-keepers of Iowa, shall we not make a united effort to secure the means by which those who have bees in our beautiful State shall be furnished with power (knowledge) to effect the gratifying change? The bees of every hive now in the State, producing ordinarily ten, twenty, or thirty pounds, may be made to produce annually from one hundred to two hundred pounds.

Mr. Gallup will please accept our thanks for his practical and instructive communications in the Journal. Will he not favor us with an article on this subject. Let Iowa be the first to take a stand in favor of promoting bee culture.

J. W. SEAY.

_Monroe, Iowa._

[For the American Bee Journal.]

Argo’s Puzzle.

R. M. Argo has found a job for Gallup.

That bees will sometimes build worker-comb when there is no queen present is a positive fact, but the rule is almost invariably drone comb. The fact that they built one-third drone comb is no proof that they did not have an old queen. If they are gathering honey abundantly, they are very apt to build too much drone comb; and sometimes they do so in such cases, even with a young prolific queen. But with such a queen, when they are gathering just sufficient to build comb and store but little honey, the rule is almost invariably worker comb exclusively.

That bees will frequently make preparations for swarming immediately after being hived is another positive fact, especially when the season is good and the newly hived swarm is large. The first case of the kind that came under my observation, occurred a number of years ago in Canada. I hived an extra large swarm for a neighbor, sometime in the forenoon. About four o’clock in the afternoon the shout came across the mill stream, “my bees are going off!” I left all, and followed them to a large pine stub. I cut down the stub, split it open, took out the bees, put them in the same hive. That night they were sold as an _unlucky_ swarm, removed 3½ miles, and in just eight days from the time they were replaced in the hive, they sent out a large swarm, which left for the woods. The bees then belonged to my cousin. They left on Saturday. On Sunday I went to church close by my cousin’s, and he informed me that his bees had filled their hive and swarmed, and the swarm left for parts unknown. I was rather incredulous, but after church went and made an examination. Sure enough, the hive was completely filled and several sealed queen cells were in sight, with several more unsealed near the bottom of the comb. The hive was a box twelve inches square by fourteen inches high, and when the swarm was hived I had to put on a large box before the bees could all be got in the hive. That box was nearly filled with comb, but the bees that went off took the honey with them. On the fifteenth day they sent out a second swarm. So much for purchasing an _unlucky_ swarm!--Since then I have had several cases of the same kind come under my observation; one in the summer of 1868, and another this summer. The one in 1868 was not a large swarm, and they did not fill their hive before sending out a swarm. The case this season was a large artificial swarm made by putting together bees from several hives, with a queen.--I should be strongly inclined to think that, in your case, they started queen cells for the purpose of superseding the old queen. When a queen has begun to fail at about swarming time, and forage is abundant, they cast a swarm. In my case, in 1868, it was no doubt caused by the bees superseding the old queen. I had a case this season, where the first swarm came out with a young queen, leaving the old queen in the hive, with plenty of sealed queen cells. In another case, when making an artificial swarm, I found the old queen and a young one both, fertile, with several sealed queen cells.

E. GALLUP.

_Orchard, Iowa._

* * * * *

The amputation of _one_ of the antenna of a queen bee appears not to affect her perceptibly, but cutting off both these organs produces a very striking derangement of her proceedings. She seems in a species of delirium, and deprived of all her instincts; everything is done at random; yet the respect and homage of her workers, towards her, though they are received by her with indifference, continue undiminished. If another in the same condition be put in the hive, the bees do not appear to discover the difference, and treat them both alike; but if a perfect one be introduced, even though fertile, they seize her, and keep her in confinement, and treat her very unhandsomely. “_One may conjecture from this circumstance, that it is by those wonderful organs, the attennæ, that the bees know their own queen._”

* * * * *

That which is profitable only to the speculating business, though it be theoretically plausible, deserves not to be recommended or accepted, if it be not calculated to produce beneficial results to the practical bee-keeper.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] My method and the use of Dr. Davis’ QUEEN NURSERY.

[2] Oranges, bananas, pineapples, and other tropical fruits are forced in hot-houses; but they never reach the size, flavor, or perfection of nature.

[3] In a subsequent communication in Vol. V., No. 10, Mr. B. says that in place of old woollen garments, he covered the frames last winter “with a sort of cotton batting comforters made precisely like a comforter for a bed; and that he likes these much better than old carpeting or old clothes.” He had one made for each hive, costing about twenty cents a piece. “By lifting one corner of these comforters, the condition of the hive can be seen at a glance. The bees are always found clustered up against these warm comforters, and communicate over the tops of the frames, instead of through the winter passages.”

[4] Shortly thereafter merged in the American Bee Journal.

[Transcriber’s Note:

Obvious printer errors corrected silently.

Inconsistent spelling and hyphenation are as in the original.]