BEE-spoke-data/bees-v0 huggingface dataset:
According to Bernard De Gelieu, their weight will vary from 3,640 to 5,400. He ascertained that, in a good season, a thousand bees carried in about an ounce of honey from the field, at each trip.
The same writer, testing the weight of drones found that about 2,000 weighed a pound. This was verified by the tests of Prof. B. F. Koons, of Connecticut, quoted in the A B C of Bee Culture.
But Collin, who was very accurate in these matters, tested drones, both at their leaving the hive and at their return from the field and found that the outgoing drones number about 1,950 to the pound, while the returning drones number 2,100, which shows a loss of nearly eight per cent in their weight, through the taking of their daily exercise. This is evidently caused by their discharging their excurenents and gives a faint idea of the amount of food they must consume while in the hive, for they also discharge their excrenents in the hive (**190**), without much reward to propriety. It also confirms the fact that they harvest nothing but always come home with an appetite.
**601.** Parties contemplating the breeding of bees and queens for sale, will do well to locate themselves as far South as convenient for easy shipment, as it is by far more lucrative to raise them there than in the North. This is very easy to understand. In the South, the bees usually winter safely, and breed early, so that the colonies are strong, while those of the Northern latitudes are still confined in their lives, struggling against the rigors of Winter.
If an Apiarist purchases bees or queens at the proper time \(-\)Spring\(-\)to recruit his Winter loss, he will most likely buy then from some location South of him, as he can there obtain stronger colonies, and earlier queens, than in his own latitude.
**602**. On the other hand, as the honey of the Northern States is superior in quality to Southern honey, bee-culture for honey production can be made fully as profitable in the North, in spite of the difficulties of wintering.
Transporting Bees Short Distances.
Confine the live, so that it cannot be jolted, in a wagon with springs, and be sure, before starting, that it is _impossible_ for a bee to get out. It will be next to impossible, in warm weather, to move a live which contains much new comb or much fresh honey.
Indeed, we would strongly urge beginners not to transport bees in warm weather. Just before fruit-blossom is the best time to transport full colonies of bees. Some advise transporting them in Winter, on sleds,' but after trial we contemed this method also. The joltings of a sleigh, though few, are hard, and will break combs; and disturbing bees in cold weather should always be discouraged. When hauling bees in warm weather, do not load or unload them while the horses are hitehed to the wagon. We have seen serious accidents resulting from a hive dropping from a man's hand to the ground, causing the bees to escape, and to sing both the driver and the horses severely.
If a colony, in hot weather, is to be moved any distance in in novable-frame hives, it will be advisable to fasten frames of wire-cloth, both to the top and bottom of the brood apartment, and to transport the bottom-board, cloth, mat, or surplus cap or cover, separately.
A specially made rack, similar to a hay-rack, is often used, in large apiaries. Hives with movable-frames should be arranged in such a position that the frames run from side to side, and not from front to rear, in the wagon.
**603**. Upon arrival at the apiary, if the weather is warm, you should at once set the hives in proper position, and release the bees. It is good policy to place a _shade board_ (**572**) in front of the entrances for a day or two. The object of this is to cause the old bees to notice that something is changed in their location, and to turn around and _mark-the place_, instead of starting out as usual in a bee-line without looking behind.
**604**. New swarms may be brought home in any box which has ample ventilation. A tea-chest, with wire-cloth on the top, sides, and bottom-board, will be found very convenient.
The bees may be shut up in the box as soon as they are hired. _New swarms require even more air than old colonies_, being full of honey and closely clustered together. They should be set in a cool place, and, if the weather is very suitiry, should not be removed until night. Many swarms are suffocated by the neglect of these precautions. The bees may be easily shaken out from this temporary hive.
## Chapter 11.
Feeding Bees.
**605**. Few things in practical bee-keeping are more important than the feeding of bees; yet none have been more grossly mismanaged or neglected.
_In the Spring, the prudent bee-keeper will no more neglect to feed his destitute colonies, than to provide for his own table._ At this season, being stimulated by the returning warmth, and being largely engaged in breeding, bees require a liberal supply of food, and many populous colonies perish, which might have been saved with but trifling trouble or expense.
"If e'er dark Autumn, with untimely storm,
The honey'd harvest of the year deform;
Or the ehill blast from Eurus' mildew wing,
Blight the fair promise of returning Spring;
Full many a hive, but late alert and gay,
Droops in the lap of all-inspiring May."
"If the Spring is not favorable to bees, they should be fed,
because that is the season of their greatest expense in honey,
for feeding their young. Having plenty at that time, enables
them to yield early and strong swarms."--(Wildman.)
A bee-keeper, whose colonies are allowed to perish after the Spring has opened, is on a level with a farmer whose
cattle are allowed to starve in their stalls; while those who
withhold from them the needed aid, in seasons when they
cannot gather a supply, resemble the merchant who burns up his ships, if they have made an unfavorable voyage.
Columella gives minute instructions for feeding needy
e colonies, and notes approvingly the directions of Hyginuswhose writings are no longer extant\(-\)that this matter should be most carefully ('_diligcatisiline_') attended to.
## Spring Feeding.
**606**. When bees first begin to fly in the Spring, it is well to feed them a \(little\), as a small addition to their hoards encourages the production of brood. Great caution, however, should be used to prevent robbing. Feeding should always be attended to in the evening (**666**), and as soon as forage abounds, the feeding should be discontinued.
Feeding to induce breeding should be done with diluted honey or thin sugar-syrup, warmed before using. This watery and warm food given in snall quantities takes the place of fresh honey and, like fresh harvested nectar, saves the bees the necessity of going after water for breeding. It thus serves two purposes, it induces more plentiful breeding and supplies water for the larval food (**662**, **271**). Mr. J. E. Johnson of Williamsfield, Illinois, reported to us great success by this method which is not usually followed, owing to the ease required, for one must be careful not to overdo the feeding or feed when the weather is too cold. If a colony is _over-feed_, the bees will fill their brood-combs, so as to interfere with the production of young, and thus the honey given to them is worse than thrown away.
The over-feeding of bees resembles, in its results, the noxious influences under which too many children of the rich are reared. Pampered and fed to the full, how often does their wealth prove only a legacy of withering curses, as, bankrupt in purse and character, they.prematurely sink to dishonored graves.
Colonies, which have abundant stores, may be ineited to breed, by simply bruising the exppings of a part of their honey. This causes them to feed their queen more plentifully, and more eggs are laid.
**607**. Bees may require feeding, even when there are many blossons in the fields, before the beginning of the main harvest, if the weather is unfavorable to the honey flow. Large quantities of brood hatch daily, requiring much food, and a few days without honey sometimes endangers the life of colonies, on the eve of a plentiful harvest.
Few people realize the great risk of starvation just at the opening of the honey crop. A good way to feed destitute colonies in Spring is to give them eombs of honey, which have been saved from the previous season for this purpose. If such cannot be had, the food may be put into an empty eomb, and placed where it can be easily reached by the bees.
Honey partially eandied, or granulated (**S30**), may be given them, in small quantities, by pouring it over the top of eombs in which the bees are clustered. A bee deluged by sweets, when away from home, is a sorry spectacle; but what is thus given them does no harm, and they will lie each other elean, with as much satisfaction as a little child sueks its fingers while feasting on sugar candy.
Hard eandied honey is still better and may be heaped or plastered over the top bars back of the cluster.
If a colony has too few bees, its population must be replenished before it is fed. To build up small colonies by _feeding_, requires more eare and judgment than any other process in bee-culture, and will rarely be required by those who have movable-frame hives. It can only succeed when everything is made subservient to the most rapid production of _broad_.
**60S**. By the time the honey-harvest eloses, all the colonies ought to be strong in numbers; and, in favorable seasons, their aggregate resources should be such that, when an equal division is made, there will be enough food for all. If some have more, and others less than they need, an equitable division may usually be effected in movable-frame hives. Such an agrarian procedure would soon overthrow human society; it is but hees thus helped, will not spend the next season in ideness; nor will those deprived of their surplus limit their gatherings to a bare competency.
Before the first heavy frosts all feeding required for wintering bees should be carefully attended to.
**609**. Feeders of all descriptions are made and sold. To feed our bees we have used for years a fruit can, (fig. 123) covered with cloth and inverted over the hive. It costs nothing and can be found in every house. We now use Hill's Feeder (fig. 121), in which the cloth is replaced by a perforated cover.
The bees can then get their food, without being chilled even in cold weather, and they promptly store it away in the conbs, for later use.
In order that the heat may be better retained, a hole of the size of the feeder may be cut into a piece of enamel cloth used for the purpose in place of the ordinary cloth.
Columella recommended wool soaked in honey, for feeding bees. When the weather is not too cold, a saucer, bowl, trough, or vessel of any kind, filled with straw, makes a convenient feeder.
It is desirable to get through with Fall feeding as rapidly as possible, as the bees are so excited by it that they con sume more food than they otherwise would. In feeding a large amount for Winter supply, we have given as many as five quart-cans to one colony at one time. Wooden feeders in the shape of troughs, as made by Root, Shuck, and Heddon, have the advantage over the cans of not needing removal to be refilled, but they are not so well in reach of the cluster.
The Doolittle division board feeder is made in the shape of a wide frame boarded up on both sides. This feeder will drown the bees unless a slat is put inside of it, to float at the top of the feed given.
The Miller feeder is placed over the eombs in the same manner as a super. It places the feed well in reach of the bees. Numerous other feeders have been devised and all have some good points.
**610.** As honey is scarce in the scanning when Fall feeding has to be resorted to, we will give directions for making good syrup for Winter food: Dissolve twenty pounds of granulated sugar (use none but the best) in one gallon of boiling water, with the addition of five or six pounds of humidity. Stir till well melted, and feed while lukewarn.*
**611.**_Sugar could, for feeding bees, was first recommended by Mr. Weigel of Silesia. If the candy is laid on the frames just above the clustered bees, it will be accessible to them in the coldest weather. It may also be put between the comles, in an upright position, among the bees, or poured into comles before it is cold.
To make candy for bee-fecl: add water to sugar, and build slowly until the water is evaporated. Stir constantly so that it will not burn.
To know when it is done, dip your finger first into cold water and then into the syrup. If what adhere is brittle to the teeth, it is boiled enough. Pour it into shallow pans, a little greusel, and, when cold, break into pieces of a suitable size.
**612.** Before attempting to make candy for bee feed, the novice will do well to read the following advice from the witty pen of friend A. I. Root:
* "If your candy is burned, no amount of boiling will make it hard, and your best way is to use it for cooking, or feeding the bees in Summer. Burnt sugar is death to them, if fed in cold weather. You can tell when it is burned by the smell, color and taste. If you do not boil it enough, it will be soft and sticky in warm weather, and will be liable to drip, when stored away. Perhaps you had better try a pound or two, at first, while you 'get your hand in.' Our first experiment was with 50 lhs, and it all got'sorehed' somehow... Before you commence, make up your mind, you will not get one drop of sugar or syrup on the floor or table. Keep your hands clean, and everything else clean, and let the women folks see that you have common sense; some of them at least. If you shouldforget yourself, and let the candy boil over on the stove, it would be very apt to get on the floor, and then you would be very likely to 'get your foot in it,' and before you got through, you might wish you had never heard of bees or candy either; and your wife, if she did not say so, might wish she had never heard of anything that brought a man into the kitchen. I have had a little experience in the line of feet sticking to the floor and snappiug at every step you take, and with door knobs stieking to the fingers, but it was in the honey house.''
**613.** The Rev. Mr. Scholz, of Silesia, years ago, recommended the following as a substitute for sugar-candy in feeding bees:
''Take one pint of honey and four pounds of pounded lump-sugar; heat the honey, without adding water, and mix it with the sugar, working it together to a stiff doughy mass. When thus thoroughly incorporated, cut it into slices, or form it into cakes or lumps, and wrap them in a piece of coarse linen and place them in the frames. Thin slices, enclosed in linen, may be pushed down between the combs. The plasticity of the mass enables the Apiarist to apply the food in any manner he may desire. The bees have less difficulty in appropriating this kind of food than where candy is used, and there is no waste.''
This preparation has been used of late years with suecess, as food in mailing and shipping bees, under the name of "Good's candy.''
Thiek sugar-syrup and candy are undoubtedly the best beefood, especially when the bees are to be confined a long time and no brood is to be raised.
**614.** An experiment of De Layens has proved that bees can use water to dissolve sugar (**273**). The same writer relates how a Freneh bee-keeper, Mr. Beuzelin, feeds his bees in Winter:
''He savs into slices a large loaf of lump-sugar, and places these slices upon the frames under a cloth. Another bee-keeper told me several years ago of having saved colonies in straw hives by simply suspending in them, with wires, lumps of sugar weighing several pounds,''--(Bulletin de la Suisse Romande.)While such methods succeed in a mild and damp climate, like that of France, they are not advisable in the Northern part of the United States, unless the bees are wintered in eellars (**6.16**).
**615.** The prudent Apianist will regard the feeding of bees--the little given by way of encouragement excepted--as _an evil to be submitted to only when it cannot be avoided,_ and will much prefer that they should obtain their supplies in the manner so beautifully described by him whose iniuitable writings furnish us, on almost every subject, with the happiest illustrations:
"So work the honeybees,
Where some; like magistrates, correct at home,
Make boot upon the Snmmer's velvet buds;
'Who, busied in his majcsty, surveys
The civil citizens kneading up the honey;
The poor mechanie porters crowding in
Their heavy burdens at his narrow gate;
The sal-eyeyal justice, with his surly hum,
Delivering "'irt, to executors pale,
The lazy, yuwing drone."
Shakespeare's Henry V, Act 1, Scene 2.
**616.** All attempts to derive profit from selling cheap honey or syrup, fed to bees, have invariably proved unsuecessful. The notion that they can change _all streets,_ however poor their quality, into _honey,_ on the same principle that cws secrete milk from any acceptable food, is a complete delusion.
Different kinds of honey or sugar-syrup fed to the bees can be as readily distinguished, after they have sealed then up, as before.
The Golden Age of bee-keeping, in which bees are to transmute inferior sweets into such balmy spoils as were gathered on Hybla or Hynettus, is as far from prosaic reality as the visions of the poet, who saw--
"A golden hive, on a golden bank,
Where golden bees, by alchemical prank,
Gather gold instead of honey."
Even if cheap sugar could be "_made over_" by the bees so as to taste like honey, it would cost the producer, taking into aecount the amount consumed (**223**) in elaborating wax, as much as the market price of white clover honey.
**617.** The experienced Apiarist will fully appreciate the necessity of preventing his bees getting a taste of forbidden sweets, and the inexperienced, if ineautions, will soon learn a salutary lesson. Bees were intended to gather their supplies from the nectaries of flowers, and, while following their natural instincts, have little disposition to meddle with property that does not belong to them; but, if their ineautions owner tempts them with liquid food, at times when they can obtain nothing from the blossoms, they become so infatuated with such easy gatherings as to lose all discretion, and will perish by thousands if the vessels which contain the food are not furnished with floats, on which they can safely stand to help themselves.
As the fly was not intended to banquet on blossons, but on substances in which it might easily be drowned, it eautiously allights on the edge of any vessel containing liquid food, and warily helps itself; while the poor bee, plunging in headlong, speedily perishes. The sad fate of their unforunate companions does not in the least deter others who approach the tempting lure, from mady alighting on the bodies of the dying and the dead, to share the same miserable end! No one can understand the extent of their infatuation,until he has seen a confectioner1s shop assailed by myriads of lungry bees. We have seen thousands strained out from the syrups in which they had perished; thousands more alighting even upon the boiling sweets; the floors covered and windows darkened with bees, some crawling, others flying, and others still, so completely besmeared as to be able neither to crawl nor fly--not one in ten able to carry home its ill-gotten music, and yet the air filled with new hosts of thoughtless corners.
Footnote 1: Manufacturers of candies and syrups will find it to their interest to fit such guards to their premises: for, if only one bee in a hundred oranges with its load, considerable loss will be incurred in the course of the season.
We once furnished a candy-shop, in the vicinity of our apiary, with wire-gauze windows and doors, after the bees had commenced their depredations. On finding themselves excluded, they alighted on the wire by thousands, fairly squealing with vexation as they vainly tried to force a passage through the meshes.2 Balled in every effort, they attempted to descend the chimney, reeking with sweet odors, even although most who entered it fell with scorched wings into the fire, and it became necessary to put wire-gauze over the top of the chimney also.
Footnote 2: Manufacturers of candies and syrups will find it to their interest to fit such guards to their premises: for, if only one bee in a hundred oranges with its load, considerable loss will be incurred in the course of the season.
**61S**. As we have seen thousands of bees destroyed in such places, thousands more hopelessly struggling in the deluding sweets, and yet increasing thousands, all unmindful of their danger, blindly hovering over and alighting on them, how often have they reminded us of the infatuation of those who abandon themselves to the intoxicating enp! Even although such persons see the miserable victims of this degrading vice falling all around them into premature graves, they still press mady "m, trampling, as it were, over their dead bodies, that they too may sink into the same abyss, and their sun also go down in hopeless gloom.
The variations bee that plunges reklessly into the tempting sweets, has ample time to bewail her folly. Even if she does not forfeit her life, she returns house with a woe-begone look, and sorrowful note, in marked contrast with the bright hues and merry sounds with which her industrious fellows come back from their happy rovings amid "budding honey-dowers and sweetly-breathing fields."
## Chapter 3 Wintering and Spring Dwindling.
Bees can be wintered safely in nearly all climates, where the Summer is long enough to enable them to store a Winter supply. In the natural state, the vital heat of the live hollow trees in which they dwell, helps to maintain a higher temperature than that of the outside air, and bees Winter so well in such abodes, that travelers, who visit Northern Russia, wonder how so small an insect can live in such indisspitable countries.
**620**. As soon as frosty weather arrives, bees cluster competely together in their hives, to keep warm. They do not usually assemble on combs full of honey, but on the empty comb just below the honey. They are never dormant, like wasps and hornets, and a thermometer pushed up among them will show a Summer temperature, even when, in the open air, it is many degrees below zero.
The bees in the cluster are _imbricated_, like the shingles of a roof, each bee having her heal under the abdomen of the one above her, and so on, to the ones who are in reach of the honey. These pass the honey to those below them, which pass it to the next, and so on, to the bottom of the mass.
**621**. When the cold becomes intense, they keep up an incessant tremulous motion, in order to develop more heat*by ative exercise; and, as those on the outside of the cluster become ehilled, they are replaced by others. Besides, the fanning of wings, which causes this roar, sends the warm air from the top of the cluster to the bottom of the live\(-\)thus warming the bees placed at the lowest part of the cluster; and these, if not too chilled, take advantage of a warmer day, to climb above the mass, and get honey in their turn.
When the weather is very cold, their humming can often be heard outside of the hive; and, if the hive be jarred, at any time, there comes a responsive murmur, which is longer or shorter in duration, and lower or higher in tone, aeedoring to the strength of the colony.
**622.** As all muscular exertion requires food to supply the waste of the system, the more quiet bees can be kept, the less they will eat. It is, therefore, highly important to preserve them as far as possible, in Winter, from every degree, either of beat or cold, which will arouse them to great activity.