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.