BEE-spoke-data/bees-v0 huggingface dataset:
If peaking is delayed until late, it may do far more damage than to leave the bees unpacked. A colony of bees that is generating heat in response to low temperature is considerably disturbed by the manipulations during peaking and the temperature of the inside of the cluster is promptly raised. Frequently, if bees are packed too late the cluster temperature is raised to brood-rearing temperature, the queen begins to lay eggs, and brood rearing is usually continued through the winter unless it results in the death of the colony. Many beekeepers pack their colonies in December with most harmful results.
**Time for Unpacking:** If the bees have been properly prepared the previous fall, with a young queen, plenty of stores and well paeked, the beekeeper rarely has any reason for opening the hive until spring is well advanced. It is best to leave the insulation on until the bees need more room, which will probably be about June 1st, on the weaker colonies somewhat longer.
**Methods of Packing:** The exact matter of peaking is not especially important for the purposes of the present work.
important provided insulation is provided on all sides including the bottom. If colonies are packed in long rows, there is the objection that the bees drift from the weaker colonies to the stronger ones. If arranged in groups of four (Fig. 2), two facing east and two west, they may be left on the same stand throughout the year and are readily manipulated during the summer. There are several methods of providing extra protection to the colonies for outdoor wintering. It is hardly possible to describe even briefly any one plan in detail in this short article.
Too much value can hardly be placed on a good windbreak. Evergreens so placed as to break the wind from the north and west are very good. If these can not be provided, the apiary should be placed in a guleh on the leeward side of the hill, or in a grove of trees. Too much reliance should not be placed in buildings as windbreaks, for they often serve to divert the wind slightly..
Having put the bees away for the winter in good condition the beekeeper can next look forward to the coming of spring and the resumption of activity again. If the details have been attended to properly one need have little fear for the bees coming through the winter in good condition and ready for the work of the season.
## 3 Spring Management
The outstanding thing in the spring is to provide the conditions necessary permitting the bees to get the maximum crop and be really for the honey flow. All the work which occurs in the spring should have been done the fall before.
**Plenty of Stores:** If there has not been enough honey left with the colony in the fall provision must be made to feed the colony in the spring a good syrup made from two parts of water to one of granulated
Figure 2: A Four-colony Winter Case.
sugar. A simple feeder may be made from a frieton top can by punching with a nail a few holes in the center of the cover. Fill the can with a warm syrup and place it bottom up over the hole in the inner cover. Place an empty hive body on to proteet the feeder. Place the cover on the super. The syrup should flow from the can fast enough to be taken up in from twelve to twenty-four hours.
**Plenty of Room:** Remember to give your queen plenty of room for brood rearing. Many good queens become honey bound during the dandclion flow. Avoid this by putting on an extra hive body as soon
Figure 3: A Shop for Retailing Honey. In this way much honey can be disposed of locally to a good advantage.
as conditions seem to warrant it. A good queen should brood in twelve frames just before the main honey flow.
**Protection:** Do not be in a hurry to remove the winter packing. Some beekeepers make the mistake of removing the packing in April. If bees were put in their winter quarters in proper condition they should not be unpacked until about the time of the last killing frost. If for any reason it seems necessary to open up the brood, be sure to do it on a warm day when the bees are flying freely.
**Water:** Bees use considerable water during the time of brood rearing. It is a good policy to provide water near the apiary. This sometimes helps to keep the bees from gathering water where spraying has been done.
**Robbing:** Bees are prone to rob at this time of the year. Take all precautions to guard against this as it may be the means of spreading diseases as well as loss of colonies.
## Summer Management
If you have had sueeess in bringing your colonies up to their proper strength for this time of the year, you are now facing the problem of preventing all possible swarming, which if not controlled, will render your colony useless or nearly so when, it comes to producing a surplus of honey. Swarm control is one of the most important problems of the beekeeper at this time of year. The thing that makes the problem difficult is the fact that the beekeeper is here working against the natural instinct of the bee.
If the colony is strong at the beginning of the honey flow and shows indications of swarming, it may be divided artificially. Some methods of management may call for examination of colonies periodically to cut out queen cells, and to keep queens clipped to prevent swarms leaving, but this entails a large amount of work and even though the queens are clipped, will not prevent the desire on the part of the bees to swarm, nor will it prevent the effort to swarm with subsequent loss of time in honey production.
We should strive to so manipulate the colonies that we may keep the impulse to swarm at the minimum.
The requisites to prevent swarming may be summarized as follows: a minimum of drone conb, ample breeding room, plenty of storage room for honey, young queens, and ample ventilation.
**Drone Comb:** The use of full sheets of foundation, both in the brood chamber and in super frames will to a large extent do away with a superabundance of drone comb in the hive. It will pay well to discard such combs completely and wire the frames properly and insert full sheets of foundation.
Large Brood Chamber: Many apiarists using the eight or ten frame Langstroth hive expand the brood chamber by adding another story for the queen as soon as the first one restricts her laying. Their plan, then, is to restrict the queen from the original brood chamber again to the lower story with one frame of brood at the beginning of the first good flow by means of the queen ex-eluder and plaing the remaining brood in the top hive away from the queen to insure the largest possible breeding room under existing conditions.
**Ventilation:** The entrance should be expanded to suit the needs of the growing colony. The beekeeper should keep well ahead of his bees giving finally a full width flow and during intense heat a two-inch entrance is not excessive.
**Young Vigorous Queens:** It is evident that the desire to swarm is generally stronger in colonies headed by old queens, so that young queens are desirable. A good poultryman seldom keeps a hen over one year old for egg laying. So it is the same with the beekeeper in keeping queens under two years old.
**Plenty of Storage Room:** The beekeeper should provide plenty of room for the storage of honey, otherwise the brood chamber will become crowded with honey, thereby restricting the queen in her laying. Adding another super when the one below is about half full is the usual procedure.
Figure 5: A colony should have the equivalent of three supers for storage. In the height of the honey flow and during intense heat a two-inch entrance is not excessive.
## How to Control Foilbrood
Ridding Colorado apiaries of foolbrood is almost entirely in the hands of the beekeepers themselves. Through cooperative effort only can the amount of disease be reduced to a minimum. In counties where inspectors are paid and educational work is being carried on, they are getting the latter of the disease.
The three broad diseases more or less common in Colorado are American foulbrood, European foulbrood and sabrood.
American foulbrood oceurs wherever it has been carried either by human agencies or by the bees themselves. As far as the writer knows, European foulbrood in the last few years has occurred only in two localities in this state. It is a disease which should not cause much trouble in the alfalfa region.
Sabrood is more widespread and oceurs during the spring in most apiaries in the State.
Figure 6: American Foulbrood in an Advanced Stage. Courtesy American Bee Journal.
Bacteria Cause American and European Foulbrood: White* has clearly demonstrated that the three brood diseases of bees known as American and European foulbrood and saebrood are caused by bacteria. The bacteria may be isolated and the disease transmitted in the laboratory as well as in the field, saebrood according to his investigations is a filterable virus.
Each disease develops symptoms peculiar to itself. The only sure way of determining the kind of disease is through a mieroscopial examination. If the beekeeper finds diseased brood and does not know what it is, he can cut out a sample and send it to the State Apiary Inspector.
## 7 SYMPTOMS OF AMERICAN FOULBROOD
In case sufficient numbers of the baeillus foulbrood gain entrance to the alimentary traet of the young bee brood, American foulbrood is bound to result. When these extremely small germs are given to the brood they multiply very rapidly and produce a poison which is fatal to the brood. When the brood dies, the germs do not die, but remain in the decomposing matter ready to contaminate any further brood they may reach. Because of their large numbers, vitality and small size they are easily spread.
**Odor:** American foulbrood develops the characteristic sickening odor. This odor is distinctive, sometimes called the glue-pot odor, and is strongest in brood dead for several weeks.
**Ropiness:** Brood that has been dead several weeks decomposes to a coffee-brown mass on the lower side of the cell. In this stage if a toothpiek, mateh or a similar probe be inserted in the mass and drawn slowly out, the mass can be strung out from one to three inches before breaking. In time this mass will \(
icefrac{{1}}{{1}}\)\(
icefrac{{1}}{{1}}\) down and form a scale which adheres to the lower side of the cell wall.
**Age:** Brood is only infected during the feeding stage. Death usually comes during the last two days preceding pupation or sometimes during the first two days of the pupal period.
**Cappings:** The cappings of infected brood cells darken and become sunken as a consequence of the decaying matter within. When the time comes for the brood to hatch normally, the attendant bees gnaw a small hole through the cappings to investigate, resulting in the "pepperbox" appearance.
**Vigor of the germ:** The germ exists in a series of stages, convertible into each other, and called the vegetative condition, the motile condition and the spore condition. It is in the last of these, in the spore, that the germ is so hard to destroy.
It requires heating for eleven minutes to the boiling point of water to kill all spores. If the spores are mixed with honey it requires thirty minutes of such heating to destroy all. When kept dry at ordinary temperatures the spores are known to remain alive for several years.
**Symptoms of European Foulbrood:** Larvae usually die in younger stages and before cells are capped over. We sometimes find the cells capped and perforated as in American foil brood. The dead brood does not give off a strong offensive glue-pot odor, except in cases where other putrefying bodies are present. The dead larvae are a grayish yellow at first and later turn to a chocolate brown. They melt down and are found mostly at the back of the cell. The tissues do not string out as much as the larvae of.American foulbrood, and when it does string it is of a granular consistency. The disease is generally more prevalent during the first part of the season.
**Treatment of European Foulbrood:** It is not necessary to destroy the combs in European foulbrood but remove the old queen and in seven days destroy all queen cells that have started and introduce a young Italian queen, and the bees will generally remove all diseased larvae in that time.
Figure 4: Display, Weld County Fair, 1922. This is an excellent way to advertise.
**General symptoms of Sackrood:** In sackrood the larvae die after the cells are capped and the bees remove the capping or puncture the cells as in American foulbrood. However, there is a difference in that the sackrood punctures are larger and usually only one. The larvae turns black and curls up, and can be easily removed. When punctured the larvae appears as a granular mass with more or less watery appearance.
**Treatment of Sackrood:** The disease at its worst is not very destructive, and when it does make its appearance it affects so few larvae in the colony that it need not cause any great alarm.
**How FOULBROOD IS SPREAD**
**Shipping bees:** Aceeding to the report of the State Entomologist for 1917-18, Bulletin 20, Wisconsin State Department of Agriculture, the spread of American foulbrood from one state to another or over widely separated areas, is due to shipping diseased bees and infected equipment or honey.
Aside from buying diseased bees and shipping them into disease free territory, the buying of used combs and equipment is one of the most dangerous things a beekeeper can do. Generally the beekeeper that has old equipment to sell has lost his bees from disease. Old combs from such sources generally carry disease and should never be used.
**Second-hand hives and equipment should never be used without first scraping and scorching or washing them in hot lye water.**
Spread of disease locally is caused by exposing infected honey to robber bees or interchanging infected combs from diseased to healthy colonies.
Broad-free dry extracting combs from colonies infected with the disease should never be used, as the amount of disease carried is 25 percent.*
Footnote *: H. F. Wilson, Bulletin 333, "How to Control American Foutbrood" Agricultural Experiment Station, University of Wisconsin.
Feeding the bees extracted honey is dangerous even though one may not suspect disease in his apiary. If disease is in the locality, one may overlook it until it is too late. It is much better to feed sugar syrup.
**Disease in Buildings, Trees and Rocks:** In inspection work one is frequently met by the statement that it is of no value to clean up foulbrood in his apiaries as long as the bees in trees, eervices in the rocks, between the walls of buildings, etc., cannot be inspected, as the disease will be redistributed over the area from this source. It is truethat bees in these places are a menaee, but their number is so small in comparison with bees in hives that it has been found to be a negligible influence.
## Treatment of American Foilbrood
The treatment of American fould-brood consists primarily in the elimination or removal of the cause of the disease. In treating this disease the aim of the manipulation is to destroy all of the bacteria of American fouldhood by the removal of all infected material from the colony, and in compelling the bees to take a fresh start by building new comb and gathering fresh stores. This is done by brushing the bees from the old combs into a clean hive.
**Time of Treatment:** The brushing treatment should be given during a honey flow, so that other bees in the apiary will not be inclined to roll.
**Operations--1:** The colony, in the evening after hives have quit flying, should be moved out of the apiary a distance of at least two hundred feet in a so-called hospital yard and left undisturbed a few days until the bees have marked their new location.
2. Select an empty hive body that is bee-tight to receive the disease-and combs, and nail a tight bottom to it. Then place a cover on it.
3. Have a brood chamber containing full sheets of foundation ready. Place an empty hive on this to brush the bees into.
4. Place the clean hive body containing full sheets of foundation with bottom board and queen excluding zinc over the entrance in place of the diseased colony which has been moved back a few feet. The queen-excluding zinc will help to keep the colony from abandoning.
Figure 7: Brood stacked over a weak colony to be treated later. Courtesy American Bee Journal.
5. Carefully remove the frames from the diseased colony and brush the bees in the empty super above the hive containing foundation.
6. As soon as the colony has been treated remove all infected comb and hives to the honey house, the wax to te melted up and hives clean: ed immediately. Saving Healthy Brood : If several colonies are being treated at one time, it may pay to stack several live bodies containing diseased combs, over a weak diseased colony to allow the healthy brood to emerge, thereby strengthening the weak colony. This colony should be treated in 21 days and all combs rendered into wax. ('leaning.the equipment : After the bees have been brushed into clean hives, the next step is to prepare the hives for use again. The frames should be boiled in lye water and then while hot dipped in another tank of hot water to clean them off. The covers, bottoms and hive bodies should be scraped thoroughly on the inside, corners, edges, and baeks of rabbets, and then washed in a strong lye solution. Melt up all the combs and dispose of the honey at once. Some beekeepers go so far as to burn or bury all the combs on the spot.
# BEEKEPING IN KANSAS.
(Dr. J. H. Merrill, assistant professor of entomology at Kansas State Agricultural College, Manhattan, who is also state spiral, has prepared the following paspers, which are of such interest to those who keep bees.)
RACES OF BESS IN KANSAS.
There are several races of bees found in Kansas. They are principally the Black or German bees, Caucasians, Carniolans, Italians, Goldens, and last out not least, the hybrids. Each one of these different races has individual characteristics, some good and some bad. With some of the races the bad points overbalance the good, thus making that race unsuitable for honey production in our state.
The Black (or German) bee has probably been in this country longer than any of the other races. It is commonly spoken of as the native bee, although this is not true, as honeybees are not natives of this country. They were introduced into New England in 1638, and on account of their long stay there have come to be known as native bees. In spite of having been here for so long, they are not particularly well adapted to this country. They are less prolific than the Italian bees, are very cross, build a great many queen cells, and therefore swarm often. They are not very good at cleaning their hives or resisting moths. They are not resistant to European foul brood, which is one of the worst brood diseases of bees. They are very excitable, and run wildly about on the combs when the hive is opened. This, together with the fact that the queen is not marked differently from the workers, makes it very difficult to locate her on the frame. Their good points, however, are that they cap their honey white, making a very fine-looking product, and are said to stand the winter well. The fact that they have been here since 1638 would seem to bear out this point.
The Caucasian bee varies in color, but closely resembles the black bee. It is said that some of them show yellow bands on the abdomen somewhat similar to the Italians, but most of them are dark gray with a metallic blue cast in the drones. This race of bees has a great many good points. They have not been in this country very long and have not been tested as thoroughly as the black bees. They were introduced into New York in the year 1880. They are the gentlest race of bees known. They cap their honey white, are good workers, defend their hives well against robbers, winter well, and, generally speaking, are very desirable bees. The disadvantage of this race of bees is that they use an abundance of propolis in their hives, sometimes almost closing entire entrances. In addition to their habit of propollizing the hive, they use burr and brace combs lavishly. As they closely resemble the black bees in color, it is very hard to tell when they are purely mated, and hybrids from this race are not as gentle as the pure bees. A great many beekeepers are loud in their praise of the Caucasian race, and it may come to find a more prominent place than it now occupies.
The Carniolans, like the Caucasians, are very gentle bees; and like them also, they have not been tested here long enough for us to know just how valuable they are. These bees are dark colored, and when seen in a group appear to have a bluish color. However, when examined closely this bluish color is accounted for by the fact that the wings are iridescent. The body of the Carniolans is more definitely gray than the Caucasians. These be, are very.prolific, the queen continuing to lay even after the honey flow h, ceased. On account of their prolificness they swarm excessively. They a very good workers, cap their honey white, and pass the winter well. They do not run about on the combs when the hive is opened as do the black bee. The most serious facts against them are that they swarm excessively and this they resemble the black bee so closely that it is hard to tell when the mating are pure.
The most popular and most successful race of bees in this country is th Italian. They combine a great many of the good points of the other race: while many of the faults of the others are lacking to a very large extent i this popular race of bees. The typical color is for the abdomen to b marked with three transverse yellow bands, and are usually spoken of a being leather-colored Italians. The workers are the best indication as to th purity of the race, as the drones and queens are apt to vary a great deal in their color markings. The Italian bees do not cap their honey as whit as do the three first-named bees, nor are they as prolific as the Caucasian and the Carniolans, but they are much more so than the German bees. They are ordinarily gentle, but even in this respect they do not equal the Caucasians or Carniolans. However, they are good workers. They defence their hives against robbers and against moths. They are very resistant to European foul brood. In fact, whenever this disease occurs the treatment recommended is to replace the queen in the diseased colony with an Italian queen. The Italian queen will cease brood rearing when there is a dearth of nectar, which fact is often valuable, as she will stop producing bees that will not take part in any of the work, but merely be consumers. The fact that these bees winter well, are of such a good disposition, protect their hives from enemies, and especially that they are resistant to foul brood, makes them the most satisfactory race of bees that we have in this country, and the ones to be recommended generally.
The Goldens are Italian bees, which are distinguished by having five bright yellow bands on the abdomen instead of three. These bees have a great many characteristics of the regular Italian, and resemble them so closely that it would be hard to distinguish them from the characteristics of the regular three-banded Italian bees. Reports as to their value vary, some reporting that they have exceptionally good results from the use of these bees, while some claim that their disposition is not pleasant and that they are not good workers. Until these bees have been more thoroughly tested it will be -well to use the standard three-banded Italian bees.
The so-called hybrid bee may be a cross between any two races, but in this country it usually refers to a cross of the black and the Italian. It is the one most commonly found in the timber, box hives, or other places where the strain has been allowed to deteriorate. These are very variable in characters, but mostly they combine a few bad traits of the others, and then add'a few more bad ones of their own.
The fortunate thing about bekeeping is that the race of bees in any colony can be changed in a short time by killing the original queen and introducing another of the 'desired race'. Before long, then, the colony will be of the same race as the new queen.
## 5 PLANT COOPS FOR THE BENEFIT OF THE BEES.