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