Democratic Sentinel, Volume 19, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 November 1895 — Two Pounds of Honey a Year. [ARTICLE]

Two Pounds of Honey a Year.

A French naturalist with a mathematical turn of mind has been calculating the work done by a hive of bees. When the weather is favorable a “worker,” according to his estimate, makes usually six to ten trips, visitiug forty to eighty flowers, and collecting about one grain of nectar. Even when under extraordinarily good conditions he visits two hundred or four hundred flowess, the amount collected would not exceed five or six grains, and the collection of a pound would occupy several years. A hive contains twenty thousand to fifty thousand bees, of which only half are occupied in preparing honey, the rest caring for the young and their quarters. In a good day sixteen thousand to twenty thousand bees can, in six to ten trips, visit three hundred thousand to one million flowers. For this it would be necessary that the locality should be favorable for honeymaking, and that the nectar-secreting plants should grow near the hive. A hive of thirty thousand bees can then, under good conditions, make about two pounds of honey a year.