Gleanings in bee culture . e case of summer dwin-dling. Ever hear of that before? July 4was spent at the various outyards examin-ing colonies and deciding what was best todo under the circumstances. The cornfieldswere full of heartsease and bluevine, ourmainstay last year at this time, and wethought conditions would surely get bettersoon. We made several trips to the bottomcornfields to see if we could discover anybees working on the blossoms, but failed tofind a single bee, and came to the conclu-sion that all colonies, even the wild bees inthe woods, were in as bad shape as waited a
Gleanings in bee culture . e case of summer dwin-dling. Ever hear of that before? July 4was spent at the various outyards examin-ing colonies and deciding what was best todo under the circumstances. The cornfieldswere full of heartsease and bluevine, ourmainstay last year at this time, and wethought conditions would surely get bettersoon. We made several trips to the bottomcornfields to see if we could discover anybees working on the blossoms, but failed tofind a single bee, and came to the conclu-sion that all colonies, even the wild bees inthe woods, were in as bad shape as waited a week longer, and then took alook. The bees were too weak to fly, andwere clustered outside of the hives in greatbunches, as if preparing to swarm. Webrushed them ot¥ by the handful. Theybaiely had strength enough to crawl. Werushed to town, and throwing a couple of100-lb. bags of sugar in the back seat of theauto we stopped at the home yard longenough to load up what feeders were instock, grabbed a huge granite pitcher, a. A progressive orchardist makes sure of perfect pollination. In case the weather is cold during the blossom-ing period it pays, and pays big, to have the colonies distributed about the orchard, especiallyif it is a large one. The cover picture shows a corner of this same orchard. FEBRUARY ir>, 1910 155 couple of large milk-buckets, and we wereon the road to rescue the perishing. Itwas apparent that the feeders would notwork, or the bees, rather, as they were tooweak to crawl to the feeders. What wasto be done with these starving creatures inthe middle of the summer, with the temper-ature around 60 F. to save them? Wepoured the syrup on the empty combs, andshook the bees on to them. This schemeworked fine, and the bees began to take upthe syrup rapidly. We filled every comb inevery hive, closed up the hives, and went onour way, rejoicing that we had saved ourpets from starvation. Three days later we again examined thehives, and not a drop of syrup was to be
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectbees, bookyear1874
