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INDOOR WINTERING. 
A dry, dark cellar or special repository built in a sidehill or with 
double, filled walls, like those of an ice house, may be utilized for win- 
tering bees in extremely cold climates. It should be so built that 
a temperature of 42° to 45° F. (the air being fairly dry in the cellar) 
can be maintained during the greater part of the winter. To this end 
it should be well drained, furnished with adjustable ventilators, and 
covered all over with earth, except the entrance, where close-fitting 
doors, preferably three of them, should open in succession, so as to 
separate the main room from the outside by a double entry way. The 
colonies, supplied with good queens, plenty of bees, 20 to 25 pounds 
of stores each, and with chaff cushions placed over the frames, are 
carried in shortly before snow and severe freezing weather come. 
Any repository which is damp or one whose temperature falls below 
freezing or remains long below 38° F. is not a suitable place in which 
to winter bees. When in repositories, the bees have no opportunity 
for a cleansing flight, nor do they, when the temperature rises outside, 
always warm up sufficiently to enable the cluster to move from combs 
from which the stores have been exhausted to full ones; hence in a cold 
repository they may possibly starve with plenty of food in the hive. 
As a rule, colonies would be better off out of doors on their summer 
* stands than in such places. 
OUTDOOR WINTERING. 
Cold and dampness are the great winter enemies of bee life. A single 
bee can withstand very little cold, but a good cluster, if all other con- 
ditions are favorable, can defy the most rigorous winters of our coldest 
States. But if not thoroughly dry, even a moderate degree of cold is 
always injurious, if not absolutely fatal. Dampness in winter is there- 
fore the most dangerous element with which the bee keeper has to 
contend. The matter would, of course, be quite simple if only that 
dampness which might come from the outside were to be considered, 
but when the air of the hive, somewhat warmed by the bees and more 
or less charged with the moisture of respiration, comes in contact with 
hive walls or comb surfaces made cold by outside air, condensation 
takes place, and the moisture trickles over the cold surfaces and cluster 
of bees, saturating the air about them or even drenching them, unless 
by forming a very compact cluster they are able to prevent it from 
penetrating, or by greater activity to raise the temperature sufficiently 
to evaporate the surplus moisture, or at least that portion near 
them. But this greater activity is, of course, at the expense of mus- 
cular power and requires the consumption of nitrogenous as well as 
carbonaceous food. Increased cold or its long continuance greatly 
aggravates conditions. 
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