Bee-Keepers' Record Volume 11; A Monthly Journal Devoted to Practical Bee-Keeping (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1893 Excerpt: ...experience of the weather in the south, and its effect on bee-keeping, both interesting and instructive. Circumstances compel the inditing of this article a week earlier than usual, and as we write, with still ten days of June unexpired and rumours of thunder-storms about, it may be that, before July comes, the now almost tropical heat and bright sunshine shall have given place to wet and cold. But for the present what interests us is to see that, while vegetation languishes and dies for lack of moisture, bees continue to gather honey. In conversation with a young Essex farmer, who is also a bee-keeper, the other day, we learned that the only item of his farming which had yielded a bit of satisfaction this year was "the bees." Most crops were more or less failures, hay almost entirely so; yet the bees have done well. This should surely "score" for our craft when considering the question of combining bees with farming. Our personal experience, so far as it affects our own district, is also instructive, for, while we have seen in Kent, garden and field produce burnt up with the heat and dryness, a single stock of bees in our own garden has filled and sealed four boxes of shallow frames--forty combs--and is now working in a box of twenty-one sections. We hasten to say that no other of our few stocks has done so well as this, though all have done well; but to a bee-keeper whose first quarter of a century in working at the craft was passed in a district where midJune was regarded as the orthodox date for bees starting in supers, this is little short of a revelation It has also showed us that bees can gather honey in a dry season, though we rather thought otherwise. If there is bloom, and warmth, and sunshine by day, and night dews without fr...