The season has been quite favorable here, not as dry as it was in some places; and our crops are very good, with an abundance of fruit. Taking every thing into consideration, I am well satisfied with my bees and their labors last summer. When I bought my bees, a man in the same business blowed a good deal and said it would not be a great while before I would run out with my Italian bees and wintering in the house. Last year (1869) he had in the summer sixty-six colonies. He fed two barrels of sugar this spring, as he says, and now has twenty or twenty-one colonies. Who has run out? I fed half a barrel or one hundred and twenty-five pounds of sugar. He don’t “fool away his money for Bee Journals, nor Italian queens.” C. H. BASSETT. _North Bennington, Vt._, Oct. 5, 1870. [For the American Bee Journal.] The Season in Massachusetts. After reading the various accounts in the Journal as to how bees have done in other parts of the country, I think it will not be out of place to let its readers know what has been going on in Massachusetts, or rather in a part of that State. About May 20th our bees commenced to collect honey rapidly, and from that time to June 7th, honey was very abundant, and I never saw bees put into the hives and surplus boxes faster. From June 7th until July 1st they did very little. In fact we had then ten days in succession when no honey was collected; and by the 1st of July pasturage failed altogether, as it generally does here in New England. I never knew bees to put honey into boxes later than July 12th, and that for only one year, since I have kept bees. Perhaps it will be new to some of the readers of the Journal to know the fact that bees do not collect honey here, in Essex county, as a general thing, later than the first week in July; and this season they did not work later than the last day of June. Very little honey was put into boxes between June 7th and July 1st. Had the season held out as it gave promise in May, honey would have been plenty in Massachusetts. I have a few hives that did very well, considering how short the honey harvest was, and to let some of your readers know that Alley can raise honey as well as queen bees, I enclose a short report that was intended to be shown to the “Honey Committee,” at the Essex County Fair; but as I was the only person who exhibited bees or honey (except four small boxes by Mr. Gould, of Ipswich,) I did not submit it. Of course Alley got the highest “premium,” under such circumstances. I suppose if I say that the stock that did best was in one of Alley’s hives, some one will think that this article is meant only for an advertisement. Well, I cannot help that; so here goes for the report, and all who do not want to believe it, can accommodate themselves in that line, and I will find no fault. I do not, myself, believe more than only just what I think is true, even when I see it in the A. B. J.: