Gleanings in bee culture . ion of her vegetable water, and there is scarcely any limitto the luxuriant vegetation which is one ofthe glories of this great State. It goes with-out saying, then, that California is a (if notthe) banner bee State. Were there not twounfortunate drawbacks, the honey-produc-tion here would be enormous. We some-times have too scant rainfall, and rarely itis too damp and cold in the late spring andearly summer for the bees to do well. Wecan in a measure overcome the former; thelatter is too rare to awaken serious best regions are Southern Califor
Gleanings in bee culture . ion of her vegetable water, and there is scarcely any limitto the luxuriant vegetation which is one ofthe glories of this great State. It goes with-out saying, then, that California is a (if notthe) banner bee State. Were there not twounfortunate drawbacks, the honey-produc-tion here would be enormous. We some-times have too scant rainfall, and rarely itis too damp and cold in the late spring andearly summer for the bees to do well. Wecan in a measure overcome the former; thelatter is too rare to awaken serious best regions are Southern Californisf, andsuch great valleys as the San Joaquin andCoachella and Imperial, where the irrigationand great fields of alfalfa make abundantforage almost certain. Here, too, the coldand damp are not much in evidence. Theseregions, like Nevada, Arizona, and Colora-do, are ever to be famous for their honey-product. Northern California and furthernorth have the rains, but not the genialwarmth and sunshine in such marked abun-dance. GREAT VARIATION IN YIELD OF HONEY. Say, Doolittle, I am in a quandary. What perplexes you now, Mr. Smith? What do you guess my average yield ofhoney was this year from each old colony inthe spring? Possibly 50 pounds of section honey. More than that. It was 81. Whew! That was better than I did, anda very great yield, considering the poornessof the season. You ought not to be in aquandary over such a yield as that. Myaverage yield was about 73 pounds. It was not the aggregate amount whichperplexes me, but the great variation in theyields the different colonies gave me. Ikept a record of each colony. Some colo-nies gave me as much as 150 pounds, whileothers gave a yield of only 25, 27, and 30pounds each. This is where the quandary part comes in, and I came over to see if youcould not tell me how, in some way, I couldbring all colonies up to those which gaveme the highest yields. Did you allow the bees to care for them-selves? No. I tried to equalize them to a
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1870, booksubjectbees, bookyear1874
