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.