Dear Bee Journal:—Just hear the good news,—our bees are again at work! Not, indeed, at the rate of ten or fifteen pounds per day, as in June last; but they are really at work at this date, September 9th.

We had been building some more “air castles,” and had talked of another yield of honey in August and September. After waiting some time, and watching and weighing a hive without any increase, we at last began to perceive a gain in weight, first of half a pound, then a whole one, and yesterday a stock of Italians gained two pounds and a half, which was enough to make us toss up our hat and almost embrace the little yellow pets (with judicious gentleness, of course).

A neighbor says the way we follow the bees across fields and through woods, and delve into the subject and remove obstructions, it is no wonder they get honey if it be on the face of the earth—and perhaps that is so.

But, look here, my dear reader, did you understand us to say that our bees were building combs? Not at all; “nary” comb will they build, with a few exceptions, and certainly none in those old-fashioned traps called boxes. It is this way. Where there are empty combs right above the brood, they will fill them with honey; as, for instance, in the upper story of the Langstroth hive. But they seldom put any honey in combs very far to one side; and hives that are full, or nearly so, do not increase in weight at all. So you see it all depends on having plenty of empty combs. We really think a few more just now would be worth a dollar apiece to us. A little feeding given just right will induce comb building, but we think not so as to pay.

The one stock that we weighed all through the season has now given us three hundred and thirty (330) pounds; and had it not been for replacing their queen, they would have done much better. Their new queen is nearly a black one, and so, also, are her workers; and, by the way, Mr. Editor, here lies a trouble. In slicing the heads off of all our drone brood this summer, we increased our yield of honey, which was all right. But we increased the yield also of new queens that produce black workers, or at least so nearly black that we have resolved to purchase twenty-five pure queens, to replace all that are not fully up to our ideas. It is true we might raise them, but at the prices at which they are now offered, we begin to think we had rather raise honey, and let some one who has more time or likes the bother better, raise queens. In making new swarms we have no trouble; but in raising surplus queens to replace others, etc., we have not made it go to suit us. We have made some experiments in artificial fertilization this fall, but have not succeeded. Queen nurseries and hatching queens in cages have also been an “unsuccessful bother” to us. We know we are but a poor novice, and should not expect to succeed always, but it does seem as if queens that do not lay, are rather a risky property to meddle with.

But there is one thing we do like, and find it a real pleasure, namely, to keep a record. Thus, we found sixty-five stocks too many to remember all about, so we got a blank book with 150 pages (bear in mind it is a good idea to have a few extra pages, even if you are sure you never will want to use them). No. 1 hive is on page 1, No. 2 on page 2, and so on to the end of the chapter. Each page tells when the queen of the hive it refers to was hatched, whether pure or not, prolific or not; if weighed, how much honey produced; if queen to be replaced, how and when; and, in short, all about the hive.

Our hives, bees, and combs weigh about thirty pounds each, and before putting them into the house in November, we are going to make every one weigh over fifty pounds, and not more than fifty-five. Some might call twenty five pounds sealed honey (or nearly all sealed) not as well as more; but, as we winter them, we think more would be detrimental, and with us all the rest goes into the melextractor. Were it not for that same melextractor, we fear, or rather feel sure, we should not get any surplus honey at all now.

In our last article it read that we had sold all our honey at thirty cents a pound, which was a mistake that crept in somewhere. The honey was sold for thirty cents per pound retail; but the commission, freight, leakage, cost of boxes, labor, etc., made quite a hole in the thirty cents. In regard to saleableness, we have just shipped the last of our three tons, and think that we could sell almost any quantity.

As respects the source of the honey we get now, it is mainly from the same white-flowering plants sent you last fall, which are even thicker here this season than they were then. And, Mr. Editor, we really think that the more bees there are kept, the more honey plants will grow; for every blossom is most surely fertilized, and the result must be more and better seed.

For the first four years that we kept bees, we never found the hives to gain in weight after the first of August; and then we had only from four or five to twenty stocks. Sixty-five colonies is certainly nothing like overstocking, and we have no fear that one hundred would be in any danger if well taken care of.

We have found our bees also working so briskly, on what we call fireweed and common golden rod, that we have labelled the honey from AUTUMN WILD FLOWERS. It is dark and thick, but has a very pleasant flavor, something like humble-bee honey, as we mentioned last fall, and very different from either clover or basswood honey.

We have had no buckwheat nearer than two and a half miles, and we followed the bees one morning all the way there, as our wild flowers were not then in blossom. We think we can afford, next year, to give farmers within one and a half miles of us, a dollar per acre to raise buckwheat. It is true it might prove a failure, but we are used to failures occasionally.

Many thanks to Mr. Tillinghast, on page 63, and also to yourself, Mr. Editor. When we commenced here with bees, our locality certainly was called poor. Bees had ceased to pay, and were dying out; and had we not been so much discouraged by what bee-keepers told us, we should probably have commenced sooner. One man purchased a hundred stocks, but utterly played out the first year. Black bees are now increasing around us at quite a brisk rate; but that is about all they do.

Mr. Tillinghast says that amount of honey (5,000), in the time, in his locality, “is simply impossible.” We think he would have done better to have said, in his opinion. We poor mortals very often have a very imperfect idea of what is possible. After the account was given in our county paper, that our bees were bringing in two hundred pounds of honey per day, and that one stock alone gathered forty-three pounds in three days, it was pronounced utterly impossible; and that if those who told it would consider, they would see that it could not be! And we were obliged to invite them publicly to come down and sit by one of our hives all day, weighing it at intervals, if nothing else would convince them, before they were still.

Counting the number of flower heads that a bee visits is a new idea to us; but we cannot think our bees visit more than a dozen certainly. One day in June, when we examined the red clover, we should think a bee would get a fair load from a single blossom; and many of them were working in the red clover at the time. The number stated seems as though the printer had made a mistake with the figures. Nearly ten blossoms in a minute for a whole hour, and not more than a load then! We agree that must be poor pasturage.

Nearly every year since we have kept bees has been called, by more or less unsuccessful ones, the “poorest” season ever known; yet, so far as honey is concerned, all we ask is—more just like them.

The only plant we have ever cultivated for bees is the Alsike clover, of which we have about half an acre, sown last spring on the snow, and which has bloomed quite profusely for the last six weeks, but is now nearly gone. We think our bees kept at least one sentinel to the square foot of it, to watch for the honey as it collected.

We had a visitor the other day (in fact, we have visitors by the score, and we are ashamed to say, to our sorrow sometimes). Well, this one for a while did not think proper to inform us whether he kept bees on the “brimstone plan” and came to convince us it was the best way, or whether he was the Editor of the Bee Journal himself (of the latter we were very sure, as we think we should know him anywhere); but eventually he taught us some things, and we hope he learned some things from us. His visit did not last quite twenty-four hours, but he really made us feel quite lonely, for more than that length of time after he was gone. One simple thing, that Gallup has often said before, but we did not believe it, our visitor convinced us of—namely, that rotten wood is ahead of all tobacco, rags, or anything else, for subduing bees, especially hybrids, who will sometimes “fight till death” when tobacco is used, but would turn around and go down between the frames “without ever a word” under the influence of rotten wood smoke. But don’t do as we did next day after he left us, and drop fire into the saw-dust. We burnt up a heavy two-story Langstroth of Italians before we discovered the muss, and the stream of melted wax and smoking honey that ran out in lava-like channels was a warning to all Novices.

And then we had some robbing at OUR house. We got about half a dozen frames of empty comb hastily put in a new hive, and removed the burnt one, and got the bees to bringing in the honey that had run out (they wouldn’t eat melted wax); but before they had got it all done, there arose an “onpleasantness” as to ownership that finally mixed itself into a grand jubilee, in spite of Novice. The burnt hive is patched up, and the combs and bees are back into it, minus their queen, about forty pounds of honey, and ten frames of comb of such evenness and beauty, that some one (who wanted to pick a fuss) said we thought more of them than of our wife and family.

Our visitor aforementioned says he has never written but one article on bees, and we think that so richly deserves a place in the Journal, that we mail it to you.

And now, Mr. Editor, we would say before closing, that in our humble opinion, the results we have achieved this year, are no nearer what may be done in scientific bee-culture, than the old brimstone way is to our present method, and humbly beg to be still considered a

Novice.

[For the American Bee Journal.]