ORNAMENTATION ABOUT THE HOME. 213 
end of life being happiness, the way tg secure it is by the indirect 
way of working to make it as pleasant for other people as possible, 
and making yourself as useful to them as it is possible to do, and it 
will have a reflex influence on your own life. What Mr. Smith said 
was this, that the great mistake we all make is in working too much 
for ourselves; we have too much egoism and not enough altruism. 
HOW | MANAGE MY BEES. 
C. THIELMANN, THIELMANTON. 
I hardly know where to commence, in the spring, summer or fall, as it is 
a continual routine of manipulations to obtain the best results for surplus 
honey and also have the bees in the best possible condition for winter when 
the honey harvest is over. I will say that I work my bees mostly for comb 
honey, for which I find ready sale. For producing comb honey we must 
have our colonies strong in bees when the honey harvest comes, but as we 
can not foretell when that will be, I try to raise as many young bees as pos- 
sible from the time I set them out of the bee cellar until a flow of honey 
comes, if ever, though I never have had a failure in thirty years, except once 
(in 1890). Most of the honey flows come at irregular times of the seasons, 
all the way from June until September. In order to get my bees strong, in 
the spring I see that they have sufficient food, (I find honey far better for 
breeding than the best of sugar) and keep them as warm as I can, until 
warm weather sets in. 
I do not put supers on the hives until honey is coming in freely, when 
the bees begin to put new wax along the top bars of the frames. If the 
supers are put on before a honey flow, they sometimes gnaw and multilate 
the foundation and spoil it by sticking it full of propolis, which they dislike 
to clean up again, and when a flow does come such sections do not sell for 
the best price. 
I let my bees swarm naturally, but have the queens clipped, and when 
the swarm comes out I cage the queen and lay her at the entrance and let the 
-swarm come back to their old stand. On the seventh or eighth day after, I 
cut all queen cells from the combs. If there is not a young queen hatched 
I lay two or three of the best cells in the entrance, which the bees will pro- 
tect until they hatch. The first hatched will go into the hive and will reign 
and kill those that enter the hive after her. In this way I re-queen most all 
the colonies that swarm. The old queen is subdued or made use of other- 
wise—I do not wish any increase; and in this way I can keep my colonies 
strong. 
I cut out all the larger patches of drone comb and replace them with 
worker comb, sometime in May, when the weather gets warm. If these 
patches are not replaced with worker comb, the bees will rebuild them with 
drone comb again. I manipulate my supers on the tiering up plan, which 
you all know; sections not filled when the harvest is over are extracted as 
soon as possible and given back to the bees to clean them out thoroughly, 
when they are stored away clean for next season’s use. There is great value 
in them, especially in scanty seasons. 
The fore part of October I weigh all my colonies and mark the weight 
on the honey board of each hive, and those that have less than thirty pounds 
