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Bee-Culture at Present: State

The following statement is made by A. J. Cook, Professor of Entomology in the Michigan State Agricultural College, and author of a book on bees: - "An excellent authority places the number of colonies of bees in the United States, in 1881, at 3,000,000, and the honey production for that year at more than 200,000,000 pounds. The production for that year was not up to the average, and yet the cash value of the year's honey crops exceeded $30,000,000."

Mr. Frank Benton, in charge of the apiarian work of the U. S. Department of Agriculture, in 1895, puts the estimate at $20,000,000 for the annual value of apiarian products. From the Year Book of the U. S. Department of Agriculture we learn that in 1894 there was exported from the United States honey to the value of $127,282, considerably more than half of which went to Great Britain and Ireland. There was also exported in that year $118,093 worth of wax.

It is said that in 1890 bee-keeping gave employment in the United States to three hundred thousand persons, and there are a number of large factories where nothing is manufactured but bee-keepers' supplies.

The amount of honey marketed each year varies according to the weather as much as the grain or fruit crop, even more. One year of favorable conditions will bring a tremendous honey flow, when bees thrive apace and Bee-Culture at Present store phenomenal quantities of sweets. Another year or succession of years the wild-flower crop will not prosper, and then, indeed, the bees undergo great hardships, and pine and die in large numbers. The wild plants suffer even more from adverse weather than do the cultivated ones, and a season of drought will often extinguish hundreds of acres of bloom. Muir tells us : "Bees suffer sadly from famine during the dry years which occasionally occur in the southern and middle portions of the State." He says further, describing the severe drought of 1877:- "But the fate of the bees that year seemed the saddest of all. In different parts of Los Angeles and San Diego counties, from one-half to three-fourths of them died of sheer starvation. Not less than eighteen thousand colonies perished in these two counties alone, while in adjacent counties the death rate was hardly less. "Even the colonies nearest to the mountains suffered this year, for the smaller vegetation on the foot hills was affected by the drought almost as severely as that of the valleys and plains, and even the hardy, deep-rooted chaparral, the surest dependence of the bees, bloomed sparingly, while much of it was beyond reach. Every swarm could have been saved, however, by promptly supplying them with food when their own stores began to fail, and before they became enfeebled and discouraged ; or by cutting roads back into the mountains and taking them into the heart of the flowery chaparral."

This method of transporting bees to flowery regions was practised in early times, and is still carried on in many countries.