2nd. When four or six swarms issue at the same time, and cluster together, I have found it to be of the greatest value to me. I look the bees over, find my queens, and place them in separate hives, and put on the zinc over the entrance; then I take a large dipper and dip the bees from the place where they alighted, putting them in front of the different hives, when the bees will separate, each swarm going into its own hive.
In using the zinc, some might misunderstand me. I only leave the zinc on the entrance from two to four days; if the queens are young, I only leave it on two days, so as to give them a flight. With old queens I leave it on longer.
Andrew M. Thompson.
Canaseraga, N. Y.
Something from Central California.
Being a Californian, and having not as yet crossed the State line, it is with great pleasure that I read the reports from other States or localities throughout the United States. I was pleased to see in the Bee Journal a report from Kern county—a county joining Tulare county on the south—of my neighbor realizing nearly 300 pounds per colony. Now I have reasons to believe that bees will produce a great deal of honey per colony in Kern county, as I own a small ranch containing 685 acres down there, and am quite familiar with the country. We have the largest alfalfa fields in the world in Kern county, Calif. We have a man in Kern county who owns in one body almost 1,000,000 acres of land.
I have seen the time that all the counties in the San Joaquin valley, consisting of Kern, Tulare, Kings, Fresno, Modara, Merced, and Modesto—all were joined in large tracts, and had their herds after herds of bellowing cattle roaming over its one level plain, as the San Joaquin valley is level, not one elevation 50 feet high in a valley that is 75×200 miles in size.
Our Senator, Tom Fowler, who owned cattle all along the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles, used to say: "I own the cattle that roam on a thousand hills." I am the same old 76. Tom and all of his bellowing herds are no more. The "76 ranch," which is located in Tulare county, was Tom's head-quarters. It has been cut up into small farms, all the way from 20 up to 2,000 acres, and there are thousands of happy and beautiful homes, school houses, churches and towns, instead of the mustang and its master.
Our part of the State is not generally known, as this is central California, and the cities north and south try to claim us as theirs.