Select three cans. Cut out the tops of two of them with a hive-tool as shown in Figure 1. Now with a pencil draw a line transversely at the half-way point clear around the third square can. Drive one corner of the hive-tool through the pencil line on one side; then work this hive-tool back and forth, can-opener fashion, in such a way that it will cut clear around on the pencil line. It may be more convenient for some to do this by using a hammer. When the can is cut in halves we shall have two square cans exactly half depth. One end will have a screw-cap in it, and the other will have the bottom. Both of these ends must be removed as shown in Figure 1. Now with the hammer pound down the cut edges so

rim, after it is nailed together, so that it will cover the joint. Lay the can on its side and drive tacks from the inside through the overlapping edges that have been spliced together and into the wood rim. The tacks will hold the edges down, and at the same time make a nice joint for soldering. After the rim has been tacked on all four sides in the inside, any one who can handle a soldering iron can solder the edges along the line of splicing. We shall then have a can like that shown in the middle of the front row in Figure 3 and in Figure 2, except that an additional wood rim has been added at the top. For this idea I am indebted to Mell Pritchard.

This is one way of splicing out a square

they will be smooth. Stand one of the halves or rings on the end of what was once the top or bottom. With the hivetool cut a little slit about 3% of an inch down at all four corners. The object of this is to make it possible to spread the sides of this ring so that it will telescope down on top of one of the full-depth cans out of which the top has been cut.

If you desire to do a real nice job, and at the same time provide a handle by which the can may be lifted, cut four strips of wood % inch thick, and long enough to make up a wooden rim that will slip over the joint where the two cans come together. Place this wooden

can so as to make two out of three. This is a plan by which one handy with a soldering iron can do the whole job; and if one's time is worth 50 cents an hour he can in one day easily make ten fulldepth cans so that 70 combs can be completely submerged at one time, at a cost not to exceed five dollars for the whole equipment. But not every one can use a soldering iron; some will have to call on the tinsmith.

Preparing Rim for Splicing on Crimping Machine.

There is another way that perhaps most tinners would prefer. The procedure is exactly the same as that already outlined

up to the time of cutting the slit in the four corners of the half rim; but instead of doing this the ordinary tinner can take the half rim and put it into a crimpingmachine and crimp the sharp edge (not the folded edge) as shown in Figure 4. This will slightly reduce the dimensions so that the rim will neatly telescope inside of the can out of which the top has

Fig. 4. The tinner will probably prefer crimping the edges on a crimping machine when splicing honey cans.

been cut. Before soldering, see that the rim is placed on square. It should not project down more than a quarter of an inch all around. In order to make a good job of soldering, cut a piece of wood % by 3, and just long enough to slip inside of the can, and bulge the spliced sides together. Then solder down four points on each side. With acid, solder and a soldering iron, it is easy to solder along each of the four sides by shifting the wood block to bulge the sides together. Any tinsmith can do this and make up about three cans an hour. I know this can be done, because our tinner tried it, and in the first hour he had three finished cans like those shown in the back rows in Figure 3. On the basis of a dollar an hour an average tinner could turn out the cans for 33% cents apiece. My belief is, however, that if a beekeeper would take, say, 15 second-hand cans to a tinner the cost of splicing the ten cans would not exceed $2.50; or, in other words, the tinner ought to be able to lengthen out second-hand tin cans for 25 cents apiece, and make good money at it.

I should explain, perhaps, that the crimping machine is the same as that used for crimping one end of a stovepipe. The object is to reduce the diameter slightly so that one of the pipes will slip into the other. The same principle applies exactly in fitting the two parts of the square can together.

But suppose the beekeeper is a combhoney producer and does not have any second-hand cans. There are two things he can do. One is to go to a neighbor beekeeper who buys extracted honey to sell again and get him to give him 10 or 15 cans or as many as he needs; and if he will not give them for the sake of cleaning his territory, he can sell them for a small sum.

The foreman of our apiaries, Jack Deyell, who has been using the expensive apparatus shown in the February Gleanings, pages 88 and 89, says that he believes he can do the work of sterilizing combs almost as rapidly, if not quite so, with 10 square cans spliced out the ful! depth of a comb, like those shown in Figure 3, and as efficiently and economically as the apparatus that costs 25 times as much. One of these containers has the advantage that, after a set of combs has been soaked for 48 hours, can and all may be moved right up to the extractor. The combs can then be lifted out and put in the machine direct and extracted clean of the solution when they can be put into the supers to be aired out. The solution can be put back in the same can from the extractor.

Other Uses for Second-hand Cans.

These spliced-out square cans will be handy, not only for the Hutzelman solution but for soaking the combs in the first place in water before the solution is applied. They would be handy in any extracting-house as simple honey containers; and almost every beekeeper can afford to have 10 or 20 of them on hand.

A quantity of them can be carried to an outyard, and the Hutzelman solution applied during the winter. The alcoholformalin solution will not freeze; and during the cold parts of the year when the beekeeper will have plenty of time he can sterilize all his combs that are out of the hives, just as we are doing at Medina.

In most cases it would be a good idea to have the extractors sterilized with the Hutzelman solution after every season of extracting. Boiling water splashed into the extractor can not do it, because the water will cool just the moment it strikes the metal work or the sides of the can. After an extractor has been used for extracting out the Hutzelman solution from several hundred combs, one may be sure after that his machine will not carry disease to combs free from disease.

One of the most interesting subjects regarding pollen is the chemical composition of the entire grain, since it serves as food for bees. Von Planta, whose work on chemical lines has proved so valuable for beekeeping in several fields, made analyses of hazel pollen in 1884, and other chemists with

an interest for beekeeping have done similar work. The discovery by Blackley in 1873, that hay fever is caused by the action of certain pollen grains on the tissues of susceptible persons, has greatly increased the interest in the composition of this material. Certain botanists have also made analyses because of the bearing of the composition of pollen on problems connected with the fertilization of plants. There is, for these several reasons, a considerable literature on the chemical composition of pollen. Α typical analysis may be taken from a paper by Heyl, who finds the following pereentages of some of the constituents of pollen of ragweed:

While the simple carbohydrates in pollen may be useful as food for either adult bees or larvae, pollen is especially necessary as a source of protein material for the growth of the larvae during the period of heavy feeding. For this reason beekeepers are interested in the per cent of this material. Protein is also the factor in pollen which causes hay fever, and for this reason is of interest to medical men. Von Planta found 24.60% of protein in hazel pollen, Stift found about 16% in sugar beet pollen, and a sample of mixed pollen collected in the apiary of the Bureau of Entomology in 1919 gave 20.54%. Miss Koessler found 11.37% in ragweed, Kammann found 40% in rye pollen, Gillette reports 19.598% in corn pollen, while Miss Ruth Phillips reported the astonishing amount of 64.40% in an analysis which she made several years ago and reported privately to the writer. There is evidently great variation not

only in the percent

age of this constituent in different pollens but perhaps also in the character of the proteins contained in pollen. Some interesting work on the pollen proteins has been done.

Feeding Bees Substitutes for Pollen.

These protein analyses are also of interest because of the efforts which various beekeepers have made to supply their bees with substitutes for pollen, they usually attempting to furnish a material which has a high protein content, such as pea or rye flour. There are in beekeeping literature few records of such substitutes actually serving for food in brood-rearing, although years ago A. I. Root carefully reported one case, which is proof that such substitutes were actually serviceable for the purpose. When bees are fed these substitutes they also usually have supplies of natural pollen to some degree, so that one is unable to determine to what extent the substitutes were beneficial. Much such substitute material is thrown out by the bees after storage. Since all forms of protein are probably not available to bees as food, it appears quite likely that in many cases the pollen substitutes are actually valueless, and without far more careful work on this subject, both with the physiology of bees and from the chemical standpoint, there is little reason to look on pollen substitutes as helpful.

That the collection of pollen on the part of the bees is purely instinctive is shown by the fact that they often do not distinguish between pollen and other materials which resemble it superficially. Mention has already been made of the fact that they are reported at times to gather spores of lower plants, but it is. not known to what degree they are able to utilize such material as food. Many

years ago the great beekeeper Dzierzon reported that his bees were gathering rye flour at a mill, and concluded that they used this as food for their brood. On the basis of this and similar observations, he and others advised the giving of protein containing flours and meals to bees at periods when pollens are especially needed but when they are scarce. That bees will collect and carry to the hive such materials is well known; but, for an animal which is purely instinctive in its be

havior, this is not at all evidence that the material gathered is useful in the colony economy. In a similar way bees collect sawdust and they have even been known to collect coal dust. One can scarcely imagine any use for such materials as these, and can conclude only that the instincts of the bees have in these cases led them into a curious blunder. We can scarcely assume that bees are sufficiently skilled in chemistry to determine what powdery substances will be useful to them, when man himself makes so many blunders regarding his own food. One dares not conclude from such observations that the bees find all the materials which they collect useful to them, and that therefore such materials should be given them in times of shortage.

An interesting component of some pollens is starch. In the beekeeping literature it is often stated that bees are able to digest starch, although the published evidence on this point is subject to severe criticism, and certain experiments performed by the writer and so far not reported in detail seem to show that bees are quite unable to digest or to utilize this material. Bees probably get starch very seldom in nature except in pollen. Dr. A. P. Sturtevant has reported an interesting case in which small starch grains from corn pollen might be mistaken by an inexperienced observer for the spores of Nosema apis, so that the starch grains in some pollens are of interest from several angles. Grass pollens often contain minute starch grains in considerable amount.

The starch content of those pollens which contain it apparently varies with the climatic conditions under which the pollen comes to maturity, and some species which have been at first found free of starch were later found with considerable amounts of starch in far northern latitudes. The formation of this complex carbohydrate in the form of minute starch grains within the pollen grain is apparently facilitated by the same conditions which bring about abundant secretion of nectar. containing another form of carbohydrates. There is also a difference in starch content according to the degree of maturity of the grain. Some pollens growing even under tropical conditions are found to contain some starch. Pollen Produces Chemical Change in Sugar.

Pollen is not mere lifeless dust but is an active living material. In addition to the constituents which can be determined by chemical analyses of the usual kind, other interesting substances have been detected by a bio-chemical study of pollen. In 1886 van Tieghem, the celebrated French plant physiologist, found that if

pollen is placed in a solution of cane sugar, the sugar is inverted to form the two sugars found in honey, namely, levulose and dextrose. This chemical change may be brought about in the laboratory by boiling the solution of cane sugar in the presence of acid, but this is not the method employed either by the bees in ripening honey or by the pollen grain. The natural means for this inversion, which is so commonly observed in nature, is by the action of a mysterious substance known as an enzyme.

The

The particular enzyme which changes cane sugar into the two sugars, known together as invert sugar, is called invertase. It has no action on other sugars of the same complexity as cane sugar or on starch or dextrine, and is therefore called a specific enzyme. Mr. Demuth and the author accidentally made the same discovery many years later in a peculiar manner. We made up a soft candy for one of our wintering experiments to which we added 6% of pollen removed after storage by a colony of bees. sugar used was uninverted cane sugar, without the addition of honey or other materials. After the pollen was thoroughly mixed with the soft candy, the candy was placed over a colony and when it was warmed by the heat of the colony, the enzyme in the pollen began action on the cane sugar and liquefied it so that the candy ran down all over the bees, spoiling the experiment. Many other investigators have shown the presence of invertase in pollen.

Influence of Pollen Upon Digestion.

An interesting piece of work in this field is that of Miss Paton, the work being done at the Yale University Physiological Laboratory and published in 1921. She carefully examined 18 pollens and in these detected the presence of 13 different enzymes, not all of them being in all the pollens. Certain pollen grains are found to be able to break up starch into simple sugars, to separate maltose into its simpler constituents and to attack many other carbohydrates which would be unavailable as food to the plant without this action. Enzymes which attack fat and protein are also detected by physiological means. This work is of interest in physiological work on bees, since the alimentary tract is so full of pollen containing these various enzymes. There is reason to think that some of the work on the digestion of the bees has been rendered useless by the fact that the observers did not recognize the presence of enzymes in pollen and attributed those found in the alimentary canal solely to the production of the bees themselves. The best paper on bee digestion which

has yet appeared has been reduced in value by this very error.

In spite of the presence of enzymes in pollen which break up fat into simpler available compounds, the bee apparently does not utilize the fat in pollen or at least not all of it. If one examines the alimentary tract, pollen hulls that appear empty are found in great abundance in the rectal ampulla during the broodrearing season. If this mass of material is stained with Sudan III, which stains fat globules red, it is often noted that the apparently empty pollen hull contains in its center a minute fat globule which has not been removed by digestion. The digestion of fat is assumed as possible in most discussions of bee digestion, but it appears that more work in this field is needed badly.

Pollen, a Remarkable Food. Recently attention has been directed to certain other mysterious compounds occurring in foodstuffs which are essential to growth processes, the vitamines. So far, no investigations have been made on pollens to determine to what degree they contain these substances. When we consider the fact that the bee larva, using a food derived largely from pollens, is able to increase in weight over 700% in twenty-four hours, and to increase in weight 1550 times in slightly over five days, one must conclude that pollen is a prolific source of the vitamines. From whatever source a food is derived, these vitamines are believed to have their origin in plants, so that one can scarcely conclude that the nurse bees themselves generate the vitamines needed for larval growth. The carbohydrates used for the manufacture of larval food, honey or sugar, can not be considered as a sufficient source of vitamines, if they contain any at all, and the only probable source would seem to be the pollens. The rapidity of growth which occurs from the use of pollens as food suggests the desirability of investigations of the vitamine content of pollen, since it would seem probable that here there is a wonderful source, easily available for investigation and perhaps for use. Perhaps a little pollen before each meal would be better for human use than some of the compounds widely advertised for their vitamine content, some of which are in fact almost free of these substances.

How Cross-Pollination is Brought About.

The problem of self-fertility and selfsterility of different species of plants has attracted a great deal of attention, espe cially on the part of those interested in horticulture. The beekeeper is vitally interested in this work, since for those species or varieties known to be self-sterile, the honeybee comes in as perhaps the

most efficient agent for bringing about cross-pollination, which is necessary for the setting of seed in such instances, and consequently for the formation of the fruits. This is not the occasion for a discussion of the numerous factors involved in self- and cross-fertility, but there is an interesting fact in pollen physiology which is necessary to a complete understanding of the problem in some instances.

It has been found that, in some plants if the pollen grain falls on the stigma of the same flower, it is inhibited in its growth and either does not germinate, or germinates only slowly. If a pollen grain from another plant of the same species is placed on a stigma at the same time that a pollen grain from the same flower is put into place, the tube from the foreign pollen grain grows with much greater rapidity and is, therefore, the one which first reaches the ovule. In some cases pollen from the same flower does not germinate at all, and the rate of growth doubtless varies greatly in different partially or completely self-sterile species. Many varieties of the common deciduous fruits are self-sterile, and others while self-sterile produce less valuable fruit when self-fertilized.

Life of Pollen Exceedingly Short. The beekeeper sees pollen carried to the hive, stored there and used as food for bees perhaps many months later. It is not, however, true that pollen grains live indefinitely, and in many cases the life of pollen is exceedingly short. It is sometimes desirable in pollination experiments to hold over the pollen of a variety blooming in early summer to apply it to a variety blooming later, and in such experiments it has been found that the life of pollen is often exceedingly short. Other cases are recorded of pollen being kept for several months, still viable. The Arabs are reported to keep date palm pollen for 15 years with good results, and sugar cane pollen has been kept for some time. In an effort to obtain citrus pollen from Japan for use in Florida some years ago, the utmost care in shipping was necessary, and the temperature and humidity were regulated in order that it might reach its destination alive. Some apple pollen has been found to live for 11 days, while other pollens live for only a few hours after leaving the plant. Whether the addition of honey to pollen, as when stored by the bees in the cells of the comb, has any influence on its viability has not been investigated.

Apparently there is no loss in the food value of pollen when stored by bees, at least for a considerable time after storage, but this is not evidence that the