ILLI^'OIS STATE BEE-KEEPEES' ASSOCIATIO^T. 135 



in the history of those colonies, at the time they were getting ready 

 the bees that would live over winter. And these three colonies, while 

 they went into winter with enough bees, did not have enough young 

 bees. Those three colonies died out completely. 



Now, among those that still lived, all the rest in the apiary, we 

 found an enormous death rate of adult bees. For the benefit of some 

 who have not seen the winter packing case with heavy packing in 

 operating, let me say that the bees do not accumulate on the bottom 

 board when they die, but the bees push them out day after day as . 

 they die. The dead are pushed out. And that is the best way to tell 

 whether your bees winter well or not. If you have enough packing 

 on, they will push out all their dead, and if you haven't enough on, 

 they will leave some on the bottom board. They push these out day 

 by day. We would have a little layer of snow, so the snow would fall 

 in the colonies. ThVi^ext morning we would go to the apiary and we 

 would find three or four or five dead bees on the snow. But they 

 accumulate in front of every one of these quite a little mound of bees 

 during the winter. That is, of course they dry down and decay, but 

 there was quite a little pile of dead bees in front of every colony. The 

 result was that when the bees were examined on the 7th of April for 

 the first time, we found an unusually small number of bees per colony. 



Now, we winter our bees in two hive bodies, two ten-frame hive 

 bodies, heavily packed, and we found on the 7th of April — it was a 

 beautiful warm day — that we had brood in seven to eleven frames, in 

 seven of the colonies which I opened. Now, we opened two packing 

 cases, that was eight colonies, and one of the eight happened to be one 

 that I just mentioned that died, so that we thoroughly examined seven 

 collnies and then repacked them. 



They had brood in from seven to eleven frames, but of course 

 those frames were not full of brood. The center ones were well filled 

 and then they tapered off to each side, and j^ou will see, with brood in 

 eleven frames, some of them had gotten into the second story; that is, 

 they were brodded in tvv^o stories. They were repacked and closed up 

 for a longer period, and then we remebered that on the 2.3rd of April 

 in 1917 two swarms had come out, so on the 20th of April we went out 

 and took a look at the second stories of all the colonies in the apiary. 

 That is, we just scraped off the sawdust, took the inner covers off, which 

 are left there all the time, and examined the frames in the upper stories 

 only. 



Now, as you recognize, we have a divisible brood chamber, and 

 the tendency is for the queen cells to be started at the bottom of the 

 upper comb, and we examined all the compartmnets for queen cells 

 in over half the colonies in the apiary. Those queen cells were cut out 

 and a third story was given in the packing case. It is built high enough 

 for a third story, we have to raise the cover up an inch and a half, 

 but it has a six-inch telescope, which makes up for that. And all these 

 colonies having queen cells on the 20th of April we gave a third hive 

 body and lifted the brood from the second into the third and of course 

 a part of the first, we did not examine them, and put them out in the 

 center and put sawdust on the outside, but not on top of the third 



