Profitable Bee-keeping.—Letter from England.
The following account shows the very great advantage in keeping bees on the humane and improved system, over the old and barbarous practice of the brimstone match, so clearly, that I send it for your readers to go and do likewise.
In the autumn of 1865, I was at the seaside on the Lancashire coast, and found bees kept in that neighborhood in the most primitive and bad way I ever met with in any country. It was the system there to put the swarm in a large brown wicker basket, and at night to plaster a thin coating of cowdung over the outside, and leave it in this way all summer. I have frequently seen the bees coming out of holes all over the hive, from top to bottom, not being able to fill up all the nicks with propolis, and giving it up as a bad job; and if it was not a good district for honey, they would give up the ghost altogether.
When the bees give over working, the owner plasters the hive with mortar, for the winter. The entrance is made three or four inches high from the cold slate or flag on which they place the basket. When they take the honey, they suffocate the bees with brimstone. Wasps often destroy the stock.
In my perambulations I called upon a person who had kept bees for a number of years in the old way; but they had all died off except one stock. After talking with him for some time on the humane and profitable management of his bees, and showing him the great loss that he sustained by murdering his poor bees, to say nothing of the ingratitude or sin in killing them after they had been laboring for him early and late all the summer, and proved to him the very great advantage the modern bar-frame (thanks to the Rev. L. L. Langstroth, the inventor) from which the honey could be taken without killing a bee, and swarms made or prevented, as we liked. I showed him that in fact, with these hives, he had the full control over his bees, and could make them do almost anything he liked.
He asked me to get the man that makes my improved bar-frame hives, to send him some; and I afterwards sent him information he wrote for in several letters.
When I called on him last October, I found twenty stocks of bees in his garden, all very strong, with plenty of honey to last them over the winter; and he had sold nearly three hundred weight of honey, all of which he had taken that year, without killing a bee. He has now got his stock up to the number he intends to keep, so this year he will work for honey; and if it is a favorable season, his bees will collect for him an immense store and make him a nice addition to his income.
The same year that I called upon him, I called upon his neighbor, a person much better off than the other, and he then had three stocks of bees. I advised him to adopt the more profitable and humane system of management; but he did not; and when I called on him again last October, I found three weak stocks of bees in his garden, and he said he had taken no honey that year and got very little the year before. I turned his hives over and found an accumulation of wet filth and dirt, nearly an inch thick on the slate floors on which his hives were placed, and the bottoms of the combs all mouldy.
I told him if he had done as well as his neighbor, he should now have sixty stocks of bees in his garden and have taken more than a thousand weight of honey that year. He is now, with others in that district going to adopt the humane system of management, and I hope bee-murder has forever disappeared in that locality, as I always find, when they see the loss to their own pockets, it is the most convincing argument that can be used.
William Carr.
Newton Heath, near Manchester, England.
Bees sometimes abandon their hives very early in the spring or late in the summer or fall. They exhibit all the appearance of natural swarming; but they leave not because the population is crowded, but because it is either so small, or the hive so destitute of supplies that they are discouraged or driven to desperation. I once knew a colony to leave a hive under such circumstances, on a spring-like day in December! They seem to have a presentiment that they must perish if they stay, and instead of awaiting the sure approach of famine, they sally out to see if something cannot be done to better their condition.—Langstroth.
[From the Western Farmer.]