BEE-spoke-data/bees-v0 huggingface dataset:
On the other hand if no increase is desired, the parent colony is placed beside the swarm, with entrance in the same direction. Keep all queen cells cut out and one week later, when the bees are in the field, remove the parent colony and scatter the brood among the other colonies. The returning field bees will enter the new hive, since both colonies have apparently been on one stand.
The wings of all queens, except the virgins, should be clipped, to prevent losing the swarm and in order to keep a record as to which are old and which are young queens. When the swarm issues, the clipped queen can be found on the ground near the entrance of the hive. She is put into a queen cage, which is placed at the entrance of the hive; when the bees have started going into the hive, she is released and allowed to go in with them. In clipping a queen, gently grasp her by the waist or thorax and, with fine-pointed scissors, clip the ends of the two wings on one side. After this is accomplished, gently place her on the frames where she will crawl down among the bees.
### Fall Feeding and Wintering
In sections where the winters are long and severe, as is sometimes the case in Kentucky, and when brood-rearing is suspended for several months, the colony should go into the winter with plenty of stores and some kind of protection from the cold weather. Much of the loss during the winter months comes from one of three causes, viz.: Lack of sufficient food, lack of winter protection or lack of enough young bees to go thru the winter.
_Feeding._ At the approach of winter every colony should be lifted to ascertain the amount of stores. A 10-frame colony, to have sufficient stores, should weigh between fifty and sixty pounds and should contain at least thirty pounds of honey. If this amount is lacking, honey or a sugar syrup should be fed. Honey from some unknown source should never be fed, on a count of danger of introducing diseases. Syrup made from granulated sugar and water is the best substitute. A strong colony will need more stores than a weak one; in either case, a syrup made of two parts of sugar and one of water, by measure, should be used. Stir the sugar into the warm water until dissolved and in no case cook the syrup directly over a hot fire, because of the danger of scorching.
A simple feeder can be made by using a tin pan containing excelsior or grass. The pan is placed on top of the frames in an empty super and the syrup poured over the excelsior or grass. Lean pieces of wood on the pan so the bees can crawl up to it and spill a little of the syrup on the pieces and over the frames to attract the bees. Feeding should be done late in the day, to avoid robbing. It is desirable that bees have plenty of stores given them a month before they go into their winter nest.
_Wintering._ In wintering out-of-doors the colony should be packed in a large box, allowing for packing space four inches beneath the hive, six on the sides and ten on top. Any loose packing material, such as excelsior, planer-shavings, dried forest leaves or straw containing considerable chaff, can be used. Dry forest leaves are one of the best insulators and are easily obtained. An empty super, placed on top of the brood-chamber with the inner cover between, is filled with leaves. Many beekeepers place a shallow or full-depth super of honey over the brood-chamber. From the hive entrance to the outside of the packing case a tunnel may be constructed of two boards held apart by 3/8 inch eleats. Four 3/8 inch auger holes are bored thru the packing case to the tunnel and these may be reduced to two in extreme weather. In using the tunnel adequate packing should be provided. A poorly packed colony will not be able to carry out the dead bees, the tunnel will become clogged and the colony suffocated.
A large packing case holding four colonies can be constructed on the same plan as that used for a single hive. Two hives are placed side by side and back to back with two othersalso placed side by side. These cases may be constructed so that they can be taken apart and stored away to use again.
The packing should not be removed until after the last killing frost in the spring, or until it becomes necessary to handle the combs.
\(Yo_{l}ing\) _Bees._ It is very important to have a vigorous queen so that brood-rearing can continue in the fall, in order to have a strong colony of young bees. With an old queen and where brood rearing has ceased long before fall, the colony will consist of old bees which die out rapidly before spring.
### Diseases
The diseases which attack the colony and cause great loss to the bekeeper are the American foul-brood and European foul-brood. These are bacterial in nature and destroy the brood, while the adults are not affected. These diseases may be carried from one hive to another either by the adult worker bees or by the operator, in honey or in combs transferred from one hive to another.
_American Foul-Brood._ This disease affects both larvae and pupae in open and capped cells. The capping of the cells containing the diseased larvae and pupae becomes sunken and perforated. The color turns yellow, later brownish and the odor becomes very offensive, resembling cooking glue. A ropy condition of the larvae is often the chief characteristic used by beekeepers in diagnosing the disease. The disease may be eradicated by shaking the affected colony into clean hives containing frames with narrow strips of foundation. Destroy diseased combs, frames and honey by burning. Sprinkle the inside of the hive body with kerosene, light it and let burn a few minutes until the wood begins to char; then smother the flames.
_European Foul-Brood._ The European foul-brood is more noticeable in the spring and early summer and is usually present in weak colonies. The dead larvae are scattered; a small percentage die after capping; the sunken and perforated eappings are less evident; the odor is not as offensive as in American foul-brood and the ropy condition is not frequently found. The larvae have a slightly yellow or gray color, appearing opaque and segmented.
In control of diseased colonies use the Demaree plan of swarm-prevention described in the text. As a preventive, use resistant stock, vigorous Italian Queens, and keep the colony strong. Refer to Experiment Station Circular No. 17.
_The Bee Moth._ The bee moth is one of the most serious enemies to success in beekeeping. The moth lays its eggs in cracks in and around the hive and the larvae tunnel thru the wax, spinning a web after them which ruins the combs. To prevent serious injury, use good hives, keep the Italian strain of bees and keep the colonies strong. To treat supers containing infected combs, pile one on top of another and in an empty one on top, place a saucer containing carbon bisulphid. Confine the fumes for a couple of days and repeat the fumigation two weeks later. It is a common practis, at the end of the season, to place lightly-infected supers and combs on top of the strongest colonies, to be cleared by the bees. The treated combs should be stored in a tight room where no adult moths can get in to reinfest them.
Sources of Honey
_Fruit trees_ and _bush fruits_ are of considerable importance and furnish both pollen and nectar. If the weather is not too cold and the bees are able to gather the nectar, there is often some surplus honey stored.
_Crimson clover_ is a very important plant, as it fills a gap between the fruit blossoms and while clover, coming into bloom soon after the apple blossoms. The honey is of a very light yellow color and its quality compares well with that from the other clovers.
_Alike clover_ will grow on land where red clover will not do well and, planted with other grasses, makes a good hay crop. The honey is of excellent quality, of light, rich-yellow color and the yield compares well with that from white clover.
_White clover_ produces a delicious, white honey, of the finest quality, which is considered one of the best for table use. It usually yields a heavy surplus, but in unfavorable seasons the plant seretes nectar in limited quantities and the surplus is very light.
_Red clover_ seretes an abundance of nectar but the flower tubes are too long for the honey bees to get the nectar; in times of drouth, however, or in the second growth the tubes are shorter and it is then sometimes worked by the bees.
_Sweet clover_ is one of the most important honey plants, since it furnishes nectar for a long time, while the honey is of light color and excellent flavor, suggestive of vanilla. It flowers after white and alsike clovers, comes into bloom when the colonies are strong and continues blooming thru a period of four weeks or more.
It does not pay to cultivate the plant for nectar alone, but beekeepers who have become interested in the plant are sowing it along the roadside and waste places, sowing a mixture of the white and yellow species. The yellow species will bloom about two weeks before the white.
_Sour wood_ produces a clear honey, of excellent quality, which does not candy. It, together with the linden, is one of the principal honey plants in the mountain sections and yields nectar in large quantities.
_Buckwheat_ is an important honey plant, producing pollen and nectar in large quantities, and comes at the time when there is a dearth in the honey flow of other plants. The honey is dark, of heavy body and strong flavor.
_Goldenrod_ yields an abundance of nectar and the honey has a golden or dark amber color, with a strong flavor when first stored, but after having been well ripened the flavor becomes rich and pleasant.
_Aster_ produces a white honey, but this often becomes mixt with honey from the golden rod and other fall plants, giving it an amber color. When first gathered it has a strong, rank odor, but after it is ripened the odor disappears. The honey is thick and granulates very quickly. The bees usually gather enough in the fall from the aster and goldenrod to carry them thru the winter and, in a good season, some surplus is stored.
_Honeydew_ is a secretion from aphids or plant lice and scale insects. Many of our forest trees, such as the elm, hickory and sycamore, are frequently infested with aphids, or plant lice, which yield large quantities of honeydew. Often the leaves of these trees become covered with this glistening secretion dropped by the insects higher up on the leaves and branches.
Honeydew honey has a dark, cloudy color and the quality is very poor. This honey is not easily digested and causes dysentery, when fed to bees.
### Uses and Care of Honey
Honey is the most wholesome of sweets and is frequently prescribed by physicians for their patients where other sweets such as sugar and corn syrup cannot be eaten. It has excellent medicinal qualities and is used in the dressing of wounds. Confectioners use it in sweetening soft drinks and in ice creams. It is used by bakers and biseuit manufacturers in their cookies and cakes which, because of its presence, will keep moist and palatable for a long time. Large quantities of the cheaper grades of honey are used in scanning fruits and making preserves.
Honey should be kept in a dry, warm place where the temperature is around 70 degrees F. Honey that has granulated can be liquefied by heating it for a short time at a temperature of 160 degrees F. and then putting away while hot in a tight container.
#### Final Recommendations
Give the bees systematic attention.
Keep bees in movable-frame hives instead of the box hives or ''gums.''
Keep down the weeds and grass in the apiary.
Provide the bees in the spring with plenty of stores and room for brood rearing.
Keep certain colonies for honey production, others for increase.
Prevent division of colony during honey flow, because it reduces the honey crop.
Operate the apiary for "chunk" comb honey or extracted honey. The production of section honey requires skill in management and a rapid honey-flow.
Keep the colonies strong by using young, vigorous queens.
Give the colonies ample stores for the winter and protection from the cold.
Treat diseased colonies as soon as they are discovered.
Read the bee magazines and keep abreast of the times.
Become a member of a beekeepers' organization.
Literature on beekeeping
ABC & XYZ of Bee Culture: A. I. Root Co., Medina, Ohio.
Produetive Beekeeping, by Pellett; Lippineott Co., Phila-delphia, Pa.
Bee Keeping, by Phillips: The MacMillan Company, New York, N. Y.
Bee Journals
Gleanings in Bee Culture (monthly): A. I. Root Co., Medina, Ohio.
Ameriean Bee Journal (monthly): C. P. Dadant, Editor, Hamilton, Ills.
dealers IN beekeepers' supplies
Dadant & Sons, Hamilton, Ills.
The A. I. Root Co., Hamilton, Ohio.
C. H. Weber & Co., Cineinnati, Ohio.
The Fred W. Muth Co., Cincinnati, Ohio.
S. V. Fry, Lexington, Kentucky.
Wilson & Wilson, 206 E. Market St., Louisville, Ky.
(Successors to J. P. Martine & Son.)
[http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924003203779](http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924003203779)
A medium-sized swarm clustered on the branch of an apple tree.
## Every Step in Bekeeping
_A Book for Amateur and Professional_
_By_
BENJAMIN WALLACE DOUGLASS
AUTHOR OF
_Orchard and Garden_
**ILLUSTRATED FROM PROtograpAPHS**
**INDIANAPOLIS**
THE BOBBS-MERRILL COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
**The Boobs-Merrill Company**
_Printed in the United States of America_
PRESB OF
BRAHURODITH A CO.
ROOK MANUFACTURESB
BROOOLYN, H. Y.
The first part of the thesis is the first part of the thesis. I have tried to keep in mind my own troubles when I first started to cultivate the festive bee. I then knew the creatures only as an entomologist would know them. To me they were merely a species of insect having certain anatomical characters. I knew their life-history in a perfuatory way,but when it came to real knowledge of their habits, I had none.
But for the kindly help of the man to whom this volume is dedicated my founderings would have been prolonged and I would have accumulated information as I accumulated stings--by a painful process.
A book of this size does not and can not claim to tell all there is to know on the subject of beekeeping in spite of its title. The subject is a big one and it has many sides. The beekeeper must be content to be a student, learning a little each year and with the consolation that men have spent their lives in the study only to leave many unsolved problems behind them.
If the little book serves as an introduction to the facinating business of keeping bees and if it guides the steps of its readers in the right direction it has fulfilled its purpose. The writer has had no other object in view.
B. W. D.
**CHAPTER I**
**WBY KEEP BESS**
**"WEDAD' yu mean, 'I ought to keep bees?? "' said my neighbor Miekey McFarland, in disgust. "Say," he continued, "I get stung often enough in this fruit business without addin' bees to my temptations."**
**"Yes," I replied, "'we all get stung in the fruit business more or less but, paradoxical as it may seem, the more bees we keep in our orchards the less liable we are to be stung--with a short crop."**
**We argued it out but in the end I convinced the old man that bees were one of the things he most desired in this world and I think perhaps he will remain con
more than the total product of those bees in honey and wax. And yet this benefit to the fruit industry has been considered only as an incidental advantage, one to be accepted as a matter of course but seldom one to be deliberately provided for.
In making my statement as to the effect on a single crop of fruit, perhaps I should be more definite and say that this calculated loss is in a way hypothetical. It would not work out every season in the proportions stated for the reason that the value of bees as fruit pollenizers is not constant year in and year out. For instance, next season might be one of those rare years when the weather conditions are such that pollenization could take place without any very great assistance from insects. In such a case the loss due to the absence of bees would be slight, if noticed at all. But in a bad year for normal pollenation the bees would make all the difference between a full crop and a total failure.
When our trees are given a period of bright, warm, windy weather while they are in bloom we can usually count on a good crop of fruit because under such conditions the pollen blows from tree to tree and is carried long distances by the wind. Also, during such weather there are always hosts of other insects browsing around the flowers and they, in a lesser degree than do bees, carry the fertilizing elements from tree to tree and insure a better crop of fruit.
But if the trees bloom during a period of cold, wet, calm weather we can not expect natural or wind fertilization to be much of a success. Under such conditions the pollen is rendered heavy by the excess of moisture, it does not blow from tree to tree because of its weight, and the wild bugs do not stir out of the sheltered places in which they have taken refuge. But it is in just such seasons that the honey-bees get in their good work. While it is true that they will not fly when the weather is cold and rainy, they will promptly emerge and get to work if the sun shines ever so little. There may be but one hour of sunshine in a whole day, but the honey-bees will be out and clawing their way over the apple blooms while the wild insects are still turning over in their minds whether to go to work to-day or wait until the whistle blows to-morrow.
In some seasons, too, the native insects will not appear in sufficient numbers to be of any great importance as factors in fertilization. Due to previous cold weather they may not have multiplied to the extent that they are numerous enough to be of value. None of them winter over as adults in any considerable numbers, while the honey-bee passes the winter, not as an individual, tueked away under protecting scales of bark or hidden in hollow logs, but in vast colonies, strong in numbers and eager to make the most of the first flowers that appear in the spring.
Honey-bees, too, will vary in the enthusiasm with which they attack their first work in spring. The black German bees are inclined to be of a rather morbid disposition, chary about getting their feet wet in spring and much preferring to sit around the fireplace at home and talk it over rather than hustle out to see what is doing in the orchard. The various "hybrids," crosses of the blacks with better sorts, usually inherit the tavern-haunting tendencies of their unworthy ancestors--not to mention the fact that they carry a dirty dagger in their tails.
The yellow Italian bees, however, seem to have a much more cheerful disposition. They seem eager for the sun and if it shows its face for but a few minutes, and sometimes if it does not show at all, these southern bees will be out hustling for whatever they can find. This is written in January and from my window I can see two "pet" colonies that I have near the house for the purposes of study and ob
## Why Keep Bees
**servation.** One of them is a colony of beautiful Italians, pedigreed, regular royal family stuff you know, and the other is a colony of Germans that never even took out their first papers. It is a warm day for this season, the thermometer is around forty degrees and there is a rather pale sun shining. Not a day that one would think bees would be tempted to fly much, and yet those Italians are out skirmishing around. I don't know what they expect to find at this season but they are looking for it anyhow. The blacks are to all appearances dead, though if you will drum on the hive they will sally forth as though for world conquest. Consequently, for the fruit grower, the Italian bee has it all over the dark bees of other races, simply on account of this tendency to fly at the least opportunity. Other advantages of both races will be mentioned later.
The apple, pear, plum, peach, all small fruits except strawberries, all membersof the legume group, melons, cucumbers, etc., are greatly benefited through the work of the bees. When cucumbers are grown under glass the grower must use some artificial means of pollinating the flowers or he will have no crop. In some cases this is done by means of a camel's hair brush coated with pollen and applied with great labor and patience to bloom after bloom. In large commercial cucumber houses such work would be so great as to be prohibitive and so the grower uses a colony of bees indoors to do the work for him--and they always do it much better than he could do it by hand and at much less expense.
Recently some investigators have shown that bees are essential to the "set" of a good crop of cranberries. I have not seen a full account of the work which led to this conclusion, but it is one case where I am just a bit inclined to think the matter is overstated. I happen to have seen wild cranberries growing in the swampsof southern Canada in districts where I know there were no honey-bees within at least fifty miles. Of course even in such a case we could draw no definite conclusions. The crop I mention may have followed a favorable blooming season such as we often have in our apple sections and in such a season, as I have mentioned, the value of the bees would be negligible.
It has long been a matter of argument as to whether or not bees injure ripe fruit. I have no hesitancy in saying that they do, though I know that my statement will at once cause a lot of beekeepers to rise with a roar of protest. No one is more jealous of his position than is the average beekeeper and no one more eager to argue a question which implies that he or his live stock may be in the wrong. Though I am a beekeeper myself, I sometimes like to stir up the clan just to hear 'em buzz.
The statement has been made so often by beekeepers that perfect fruit is never
Why Kleep Beess **11** place most of our fruit grown in commercial orchards is picked before it reaches a stage when it would be attractive to bees.
But test the reader think that bees are of value only as an influence in fruit growing let me assure him that they also sometimes produce a surplus of honey which is widely known and justly famous as an article of human food.
When I say they "sometimes produce a surplus" I am adhering strictly to the truth because they often do not produce enough for their own use during the following winter. The reason for such failures will be developed as this book progresses. Suffice it to say, however, that the cause of failure is usually with the man who owns the bees rather than with the bees themselves. I am assured on good authority that there are eight hundred thousand beekeepers in this country and that less than ten per cent. of them are good beekeepers.
The annual honey crop of the United States is said to be valued at about forty million dollars and other good authorities who understand both mathematics and beekeeping have assured me that this crop could be increased to three times its present amount if the beekeepers of the country would only give their bees better attention. Unlike many other side-lines this is a business that the fruit grower can engage in and have a double interest and a double return. He will secure better crops of fruit, and as an incident to his improved orchard conditions he will harvest a crop of honey to help pay the income tax or the deficit on the orchard--as the case may be.
Bees do not require close attention for long periods of time. Unlike poultry, or rabbits, or dairy cattle, or goats, or any of the other breeds of live stock, they do not have to be fed daily, they do not have to be milked, and the eggs are not gathered nor the young ones sold at a certain age.
cide to keep bees for any one of these reasons be certain that you start with a modest number. One good colony is enough for the beginer. More than five is too many.