_Travelling Lecturer of the Agricultural Union,
Province of the Rhine_.
_Löhndorf_, June 22, 1870.
[For the American Bee Journal.]
Profitable Bee-keeping.--Letter from England.
The following account shows the very great advantage in keeping bees on
the humane and improved system, over the old and barbarous practice of
the brimstone match, so clearly, that I send it for your readers to go
and do likewise.
In the autumn of 1865, I was at the seaside on the Lancashire coast, and
found bees kept in that neighborhood in the most primitive and bad way I
ever met with in any country. It was the system there to put the swarm
in a large brown wicker basket, and at night to plaster a thin coating
of cowdung over the outside, and leave it in this way all summer. I have
frequently seen the bees coming out of holes all over the hive, from top
to bottom, not being able to fill up all the nicks with propolis, and
giving it up as a bad job; and if it was not a good district for honey,
they would give up the ghost altogether.
When the bees give over working, the owner plasters the hive with
mortar, for the winter. The entrance is made three or four inches high
from the cold slate or flag on which they place the basket. When they
take the honey, they suffocate the bees with brimstone. Wasps often
destroy the stock.
In my perambulations I called upon a person who had kept bees for a
number of years in the old way; but they had all died off except one
stock. After talking with him for some time on the humane and profitable
management of his bees, and showing him the great loss that he sustained
by murdering his poor bees, to say nothing of the ingratitude or sin in
killing them after they had been laboring for him early and late all the
summer, and proved to him the very great advantage the modern bar-frame
(thanks to the Rev. L. L. Langstroth, the inventor) from which the honey
could be taken without killing a bee, and swarms made or prevented, as
we liked. I showed him that in fact, with these hives, he had the full
control over his bees, and could make them do almost anything he liked.
He asked me to get the man that makes my improved bar-frame hives, to
send him some; and I afterwards sent him information he wrote for in
several letters.
When I called on him last October, I found twenty stocks of bees in his
garden, all very strong, with plenty of honey to last them over the
winter; and he had sold nearly _three hundred weight of honey_, all of
which he had taken that year, _without killing a bee_. He has now got
his stock up to the number he intends to keep, so this year he will work
for honey; and if it is a favorable season, his bees will collect for
him an immense store and make him a nice addition to his income.
The same year that I called upon him, I called upon his neighbor, a
person much better off than the other, and he then had three stocks of
bees. I advised him to adopt the more profitable and humane system of
management; but he did not; and when I called on him again last October,
I found three weak stocks of bees in his garden, and he said he had
taken _no honey_ that year and got very little the year before. I turned
his hives over and found an accumulation of wet filth and dirt, nearly
an inch thick on the slate floors on which his hives were placed, and
the bottoms of the combs all mouldy.
I told him if he had done as well as his neighbor, he should now have
sixty stocks of bees in his garden and have taken more than a thousand
weight of honey that year. He is now, with others in that district going
to adopt the humane system of management, and I hope bee-murder has
forever disappeared in that locality, as I always find, when they see
the loss to their own pockets, it is the most convincing argument that
can be used.