BEE-spoke-data/bees-v0 huggingface dataset:
The value of a windbreak, the superiority of a two-story over a one-story hive for wintering and the value of packing are clearly shown. During the winter of 1919-20 this experiment was continued, and when on the 19th of May the bees were weighed to determine which form of wintering had been best for them, some additional factors were found to have entered into the experiment that were not present in the first two years' work. These bees were placed in winter quarters on October 4, 1919, with a known amount of honey and a known number of bees in each hive. Sufficient stores were left in each colony to feed them through any ordinary winter and to the beginning of the nectar flow. On the 5th of April the temperature at Manhattan dropped to five degrees above zero. This low temperature was accompanied by a heavy snowstorm. As a consequence of this unseasonable weather the flowers on which the bees would ordinarily depend for spring food were killed, consequently they were forced to exist on the stores which were left in the hives in the fall. One colony between October 4 and May 19 consumed 52%' pounds of honey, after which it was fed two half-filled frames of honey and six pounds of sugar. This will explain why some of the colonies became short on stores before they were weighed in the spring.
When the one-story unpacked hive in the windbreak is compared with the one-story unpacked hive in the open, the odds in the number of bees gained and in the amount of brood are largely in favor of the one protected by a windbreak. Both of these hives had unconsumed stores when the spring weighing was made, but the hive in the windbreak had consumed nine pounds more than the one in the open, which it had used in brood rearing. The one in the windbreak had five frames of brood and gained 10,000 bees, while the one in the open only had 3% frames of brood and gained 575. The fact that the packed hive in the open gained more than the unpacked hive in the open, both in number of bees and the amount of brood, demonstrated that, with other things being equal, packing was of a distinct advantage. Here again was shown the value of a windbreak over no windbreak, and, as in the open, the two-story unpacked hive gained 8,000 more bees than the one-story unpacked hive, the superiority of the large hive over the small one for wintering was shown. The superiority of the packed hive over the unpacked hive in the open again showed the value of winter protection.
Some valuable deductions can be made from these results, some of wh'ch are: When a colony has insufficient stores, even though it may apparently winter well, yet the queen will so far slow down in her work as to seriously weaken the colony far below the strength that it would have been had it been supplied with sufficient stores. Mr. Crane's statement that if bees are supplied with plenty of honey "they can stand almost any cold for a time," and also his contention that without stores winter packing will not save them, are both strikingly borne out by the above-named figures. When considering the question of wintering bees too much emphasis should not be placed on any one feature of wintering. We know that we must have a large number of the young bees, that we must have plenty of winter stores, and also that if we can give our bees the added value of a windbreak and winter protection it will well repay us; but no beekeeper should rely on any one of these factors alone and expect to get the very best results. They are all necessary.
## Removing the Honey Crop.
Honey is ordinarily produced either in the form known as comb honey or extracted honey, and the method to be followed in removing the crop will depend upon which kind of honey is being produced.
The proper time to remove comb honey from the hive is when all of the cells are sealed over, or when the honey flow is over for the season.
As comb honey depends largely upon its fine appearance, great care should be taken to prepare this honey for the market is as pleasing a manner as possible. First, the propolis and other foreign materials should be scraped from the sections, after which their appearance will be greatly improved if they are rubbed lightly with sandpaper. After the sections have been thoroughly cleaned they should be graded and packed in the shipping cases for market. The sections may be graded according to the rules adopted either by the National Beekeepers' Association or by the Colorado rules. Whichever system of grading is used, care should be taken to make sure that all of the sections in one case are of one grade, and that that grade is the one under which they are to be sold.
Extracted honey may be removed from the hive when the cells in the extracting frame are two-thirds capped over, because at this time the honey will be sufficiently ripened to be removed from the hive. It formerly was a custom to cut out the wax and squeeze it through a strainer of some sort, the product being called "strained honey." Now, however, since the invention of the honey extractor, the exppings are cut from the cells with a sharp knife, and the frames are placed in the basket of the extractor and whirled rapidly, the honey being thrown out of the cells by the action of centrifugal force. The exppings which have been removed from the cells may be placed in a wire basket and allowed to drain, as considerable honey will be found to have adhered to them, or they may be cut off directly into a capping melter, which is so arranged that the exppings melt and pass out at the front of the melter, together with the honey. The combination of melted honey and wax is caught in a container and allowed to remain until cool, when it will be found that the wax has risen to the top and the honey may be drawn off and sold.
Extracted honey appears on the market in various-sized containers, from the small-sized glass jar to the 60-pound can. The beekeeper will have to decide for himself which size he will use, and this will depend upon the market to which he caters.
## 7 Comb Honey.
Frank Hill, Sabetha.
My first attempt at honey production was a try for comb honey. In fact, I did not know that there was such a thing as extracted honey. I had seen but few bees, just scattered little apiaries of a few colonies each, and all that the owners of them attempted was the getting of a little comb honey. The first colony of bees I owned was a swarm that lit on a peach tree in our yard, and I furnished a hive and a neighbor lived them for me. I had been interested in bees before, and the fact that I was now owner of a colony renewed that interest. I began to get literature on the subject, and most of it came from A. I. Root Company. The Root company at that time was booming the Danzenbaker hive for the production of comb honey, and after that first colony my bees were housed in the Dan-enbaker hive, which, by the way, seems to be obsolete now. You see that comb honey was my idea.
In the literature which I read I found that the big men of the bee business were writing on how to produce comb honey. The idea was to produce fine, fancy comb honey. The idea got hold of me that it required a good bee man with knowledge of the business to produce a fine article of comb honey. I had, of course, found out by this time that there was such a thing as extracted honey, but it did not appeal to me in the least. I therefore went in for comb honey, and did my best, as I have done every year since, to produce just as fine and fancy a crop of comb honey as I possibly could. Some years I have not produced a single section, but that has been the fault of the season more than my fault.
There are other reasons why I try for comb honey. The difficulty one contends with in its production makes it a sort of sporting proposition that appeals to me. If some one else can do a thing that I want to do, and he does it successfully, I want to do it or know just what that fellow knows that I do not know. I am not different in this from other men. The fact that an object is a little difficult to obtain makes most of us want it more. And there is no doubt about it being more difficult and that it requires a better informed bee man to produce marketable comb honey than it does to produce extracted honey.
I am also willing to agree with some men who say that there is a desirable flavor in comb honey that is not in extracted honey. I am unable to say why. And I am also convinced that there is some sort of a chemical difference. For instance, this winter while getting my comb-honey supers ready for the bees I found several half-filled sections of honey. Part were sealed and part unsealed. The sealed and the unsealed were both liquid, while that which was extracted last fall was long ago crystallized hard. Those partly filled sections were simply delicious and had a distinctly different flavor from the extracted honey made the same season and extracted last fall.
Then the beauty of the product appeals to me also. It is actually a pleasure to me to open supers of fine comb honey, scrape them clean, put them in the shipping case, stamp their net weight, nail them up and put them in tiers, glass side out, that I can see the whole tier. It looks good to other people also. I do not believe any person ever came into my shop while I had comb honey in sight who did not remark upon the beauty of the product. Now, I really enjoy doing anything with bees, with the possible exception of twisting an extractor or feeding a large number of robbing colonies in the late fall. I can work longer without getting tired, and enjoy about every minute of it, in working with or packing comb honey.
There is another reason why I produce comb honey if I can, and that is, it is easy to sell and has always sold for a good price. If one has, say, 100 cases of comb honey to sell in September it makes a nice bunch of money coming in at a time when I am likely to be broke or at the breaking point, and a check which that much comb honey brings in looks good to me at any time; but when one begins to feel as if something was wrong with one's finances, and a check for from $500 to $700 comes in it does something towards rolling the dark clouds away, believe me. For instance, last summer was a mighty poor honey year for me, but I managed to induce the bees to produce 260 cases of comb honey. One hundred cases were sold at $6 per case and the balance I got $6.25 for, delivered at the river. That brought $1,600, less the freight, and I had it all during the first week in September. There are dozens of people in my own little town who will not buy extracted honey, but do buy comb honey. They are people who do not think the extracted adulterated, either; they simply prefer comb honey. The cities are full of people who do not consider extracted honey at all, and a lot of them know nothing about any honey but comb honey, and as a rule they are people who are able and willing to pay more for it than they would for extracted honey. They should pay more, I think; as a general thing they should pay about twice as much per pound, considering a section a pound, as they should pay for extracted honey. Comb honey is the product of a specialist, in a way.
The very best colonies are required to produce it; it is produced from the best sources. In many places the crop is very uncertain, and it requires more work and material to get it ready for market.
The cost of producing comb honey compared with the cost of producing extracted honey is rather hard to compute. It has been estimated that a given colony of bees will produce something like twice as much extracted honey as it will comb honey. I doubt that, if the comb-honey producer does his duty. I am satisfied that more extracted honey will be produced, especially if the bees have combs already drawn. If the bees are placed on full sheets of foundation, the difference will be a little, but just a little, in favor of the extracted-honey bees; but given good, strong colonies and a good flow, with some drawn comb in the comb-honey supers, I believe that the difference will be very little. The difference, I think, will be that the bees will have to build up to the wood in the sections, and they usually leave a little depression where the combs join the wood, while the bees on Hoffman frames build solid, and of course will make the heaviest combs. In short, I think the bees will build nearly as rapidly in a properly prepared super as they will in a Hoffman frame, both being prepared with full sheets of foundation. A frame of solid honey will weigh more, of course, than will a section holder of four sections of the same dimensions, because the depression next the wood takes off a little and the wood where the sections join takes up a little space. But comb honey is not sold by the pound; it is sold by the one or two dozen sections. I have never had a buyer complain of honey that weighed as much as eleven ounces net. I have had them ask me if the honey was heavy before they bought, and of course heavy, well-filled sections are to be preferred, but I have never been asked to cut the price on account of the weight. I will say here that I believe the _average_ section I produce will weight about 12% ounces net. I have shipped considerable honey weighing ten ounces net, but have voluntarily taken one dollar per case off the price. I do not believe, as a matter of fact, that a cent was taken off the price when it was retailed. It costs more to produce comb honey than it does extracted honey, because of the sections and foundation that must be furnished every erop, and to this must be added the cost of shipping cases and crates in which the shipping cases are packed. Last fall it cost me for material for a case of comb honey as follows:
''' Shippingease Sections... $0:35 Sections....21%. Foundation....11%. Crates (one-sixth of the cost of a crate holding 6 cases)....20 Total... $0.88 The whole cost being 88 cents for the material to get a case of comb honey ready for market. Calling a section a pound would make the case of honey comparable to 24 pounds of extracted honey. To make the figures even we will say the case weighs 20 pounds, which it will weigh. To get 20 pounds of extracted honey ready to sell it must be packed in, say, the 5-pound pair. When cost and freight are added; a 5-pound pair will cost, or did cost me, about 9 cents each, four 5-pound pails costing 36 cents. Say one can sell the 5-pound pail for $1, making the 20 pounds bring $4. The difference is that I sold the 20 pounds of comb honey at $6.25 with an expense of 88 cents, leaving a profit of $5.37 to me. You see I have a difference of $1.82 to pay me for the extra trouble in getting supers ready and the extra trouble it requires in working the bees. One thing to take into account in favor of comb honey is the taking care of extracting combs. They must be either put back on the bees or thoroughly treated to kill and prevent the wax moth from destroying them. It does not cost qu.ite as much per pound to pack extracted honey in 60-pdund cans, but the price per pound for it in that size package is nearly always less. It can be seen that even if the bees do not produce as much comb honey as they do extracted, the price averages, or has averaged with me, about two-thirds more. The prices I quote are the highest I received for both kinds this last year. The work of getting the supers ready, folding the sections, putting in the foundation, etc., comes in the winter when a little work is welcomed, and I would rather have it to do then than not. It is mighty bad business for a bee man who has as many as say 100 comb-honey supers to get ready to wait till he sees whether there is going to be a crop or not. It requires too much time, and the bees will not wait for anything, and it pays to have everything all ready.
Now, as to handling bees to produce honey, there are, I believe, almost as many systems as there are men. There are plenty of books, and good, well-written books, by men who have had experience and know the game. If I haven't read them all it is because I have not been able to get them. I am not going to attempt to tell you how it should be done. You can get books that will tell you that. I will try to tell you how I work, and the plan may or may not suit you.
My bees are all in outyards. I have more than 400 colonies, and they are all in the country, or will be in the spring, but a dozen or so that I keep at home to raise queens with and help with increase there. You see that any intensive plan such as you will find in Doctor Miller's "Fifty Years Among the Bees" is out of the question. First I will tell you why my bees are in small outyards. My location is a good one, providing it rains enough, which it does not often do. But very often one locality just a few miles away will get one or two rains in one season that another location will not get. I have had one or two yards give me a fair crop, while others in the same season had to be fed for winter. A rain makes a b:g difference. My bees are in eight yards of from thirty-four to sixty colonies each. My bees are wintered--or that is what I try to do--in two hive bodies. I use ten-frame hives. If they should be wintered on one set of combs I put another set on in the spring when I unpack them. They then have plenty of room for almost any kind of a queen. I clip all queens in the spring, and try to get it done during fruit bloom. Then an inventory of the hives is taken and the condition of the colonies is marked on the hives. One can devise any way to do this that suits. When I clip a queen I put an X on some part of the hive, with the date. When I find a clipped queen I put an O there. When I find no queen I put a QX there, so I know where to find them with a new queen. At that time a colony must have plenty of stores to sustain it until the flow. After the stores are supplied and the requesting is done, they are left till they begin to build up pretty strong. Then I inspect and see that _Comb Honey._
The big question is, of course, swarming. I hereby admit that I know little about it. I have read a lot, all that I have found, and do not think that anyone has very much positive knowledge about it or how to prevent or stop it after the bees have the notion of swarming well established. I believe we do know what induces it, but if it is known how to keep a strong colony of bees working in a confined situation such as comb-honey supers, without swarming, I do not know who knows it. Some colonies will do that very thing; some will attempt to swarm at almost the first symptom of crowding. Why one colony should swarm and another not, under the same conditions, is what I do not know. After a colony has shown the intention of swarming, all my own attempts to prevent it have been failures. I have tried all the varieties of shaking I have ever heard of and invented a few of my own. I have shaken them on empty combs, on full combs--that is, combs of honey--on partly filled ones. I have shaken them twice and three times in the same day, and every time I have shaken a colony of bees that are getting ready to swarm, and shaken them with their own queen, I have failed without exception. Some one else may have a different movement than mine, but my own does not do the business. They will not go to work by that manipulation.
One way I have succeeded in making them work was to take their queen entirely away and leave just one queen cell without brood till the cell hatches, then giving it back to them after the queen has mated. They will then work in a sort of listless way till the young queen hatches, and then they are all right; but I have lost some valuable time, of course. I have also tried the following with success: Take the queen away with one or two frames of brood, shake out all the bees some distance from the hive, and set a weak colony on the stand that has a good queen. I put the old queen with one or two frames of brood on the stand I took the weak colony from. I destroy all queen cells in the old hive and let the bees return to this hive. I have had them go to work almost at once after that manipulation. The new queen seems to put a new sort of aspect on things, and being shaken and disorganized, they have always accepted the new one and have gone to work. At that time, if I still have more comb-honey supers to fill, and flow continues, I can then go to one of the colonies marked No. 2 and make the same manipulation before described, take their extracting super and put it on one of those not marked, and give them comb-honey supers. They will be by that time in condition to build sections, and just as good as the ones marked No. 1. It will be seen that I do not give any colony comb-honey supers until they have been well started working upstairs and have the storing habit established. I do not have many or a large per cent of colonies attempt to swarm when the plan is followed, but I do have some. In my largest yard last year, one of sixty colonies, I had five colonies try to swarm out of thirty that I had on comb-honey supers. That yard did not have the best flow. The one that had the best flow, a yard of fifty-three colonies, with thirty-five comb-honey colonies, did not have a single one attempt to swarm that I discovered; but of course I might have missed out on one or two. This is my best reason for clipping the queen.
I make weekly visits during the flow. It is easy to discover a colony that is making the attempt to swarm, if the queen is clipped. They may be clustered over the outside of the hive. They will not be in the supers when other colonies are. The queen may be in the grass with a bunch of bees with her. If the bees do not seem normal, are not working as they should, or as the others are, a look in the brood chamber will reveal whether they want to swarm or not. If the queens were not clipped they very likely would be gone when I got there, or hanging on some of those big trees on the highest limb they could find. Another good reason for clipping the queens is that I can keep a line on the age of the queens and look the combs over for disease. I do not request at any given time, as I have not seen fit to do that as yet; but I know where the poor queens are, and then when I find those good, big supersedure cells I know right where to put them.