THE HONEY BEE — HAJMBLETON 477 



sell bees also sell queens, so that a new queen may be obtained in short 

 order to replace a failing one. 



The greatest mistake that beginners make is in not giving the bees 

 sufficient hive space in which to work. Often the beginner, in an 

 effort to keep his investment low, will try to maintain the bees in a 

 single-story hive. A good queen that can lay 1,500 eggs a day and 

 maintain this rate for days at a time requires at least two hive bodies. 

 These should be considered the sacred property of the bees themselves 

 from which the beekeeper is not to remove any honey. During rainy 

 spells and periods when it is too cold for the bees to fly, they still must 

 have their daily food. Large reserves of honey should be on hand at 

 all times. Honey that the bees make in addition to that stored in the 

 two hive bodies the beekeeper can claim for himself. 



The nectar as brought by the bees into the hive may contain upward 

 of 80 percent water, whereas honey contains only about 18 percent. 

 This excess water has to be removed by the bees. For this purpose, 

 comb space is required, so that the watery nectar may be spread over 

 as large a surface as possible to hasten evaporation ; thus more combs 

 are necessary to make the crop than are required to hold the ripened, 

 finished honey. 



A colony of bees should never be allowed to fill the hive completely 

 while the honey crop is being made. Shortly before every comb is 

 filled with brood, pollen, or honey, a colony, sensing the end of its 

 job, makes preparation to swarm. In this preparation there is a de- 

 cided let-down in the storage of honey. Swarming is objectionable 

 from this standpoint. 



Eeproduction, the natural dividing of a colony into two or more 

 parts, is one of the involvements in the complex phenomenon of 

 swarming. Perhaps the most obvious cause for a colony to swarm is 

 that its living quarters are overly crowded. The colony has finished 

 its job — part of the bees move on to new and more commodious quar- 

 ters. Another colony is born. The old queen and the majority of bees 

 old enough to fly leave the hive. If the swarm is not captured, the 

 bees light off to the woods, find a hollow tree or a cavity in the wall 

 of a dwelling and build a new home. In the parent hive will be left 

 all the young bees, brood, and a number of queen cells from which 

 one or more new queens will emerge. One of these will eventually 

 head the newly formed colony. 



The bees that fly to the fields for nectar and pollen do not deposit 

 the nectar in the cells of the hive. They turn the nectar over to young 

 house bees — bees too young to fly — and it is these house bees that do 

 all the work from that point on in converting the nectar into full mel- 

 low-ripe honey. The combination of the young and old bees is es- 

 sential to produce a crop of honey. Wlien a colony swarms, this very 



