656 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE 



November, 1918 



flying out and stinging him, he tacked 

 a slat over the entrance of all his hives. He 

 then put on the wrapping and tacked it 

 down. The plan was to remove the slats 

 after the bees quieted down in all the hives. 

 This he did as he supposed; but the follow- 

 ing spring he discovered that there was one 

 hive he had overlooked, where the slat 

 closing the entrance had not been taken 

 away. That colony, he concluded, would be 

 dead. He examined all the others, suppos- 

 ing them to be alive, but found them all 

 dead. When he examined the one over 

 whose entrance the slat had been nailed, 

 he found it was lively and in fine condition. 

 Ordinarily, closing the entrance kills the 

 colony; but it is probable that the one nail 

 in the slat left a crack, which, while it kept 

 the bees from coming out, did not prevent 



scheme has been working well with him 

 every year, altho one year he wintered well 

 with a slot instead of the holes. 



E. F. Holtermann, who has wintered his 

 bees so successfully in large quadruple win- 

 ter cases, similar to those shown in Fig. 1, 

 has been using %-inch holes, all of them 

 ojien. When I explained to him that he 

 might get better results with one hole, he 

 admitted that that might be true, but he 

 had not tried it. 



At this time I would hesitate to advise 

 every one to contract entrances down to 

 a single % hole during the coldest part of 

 the winter; but I certainly would use three 

 or four holes in place of a slot, and during 

 the very coldest part of the winter contract 

 them down to, say, two holes, and a few 

 colonies down to one hole. 



NEW STYLE BL OCK.S/e ' ^/OL ES 



Fig. 9. — This shows the old and new style of entrance-contracting cleats. When either of them is pulled 

 out of the hive it makes a summer entrance % inch deep by the width of the hive. The lower one, having 

 the holes, is much tetter than the upper one, and, accordiivg' to Dr. E. F. Phillips of the Bureau otf Ento- 

 mology, Washington, D. C, all the holes except the one in the center should he closed during the coldest 

 part of the winter. In late fall or early spring an additional hole or two are opened up. The onei-hole 

 entrance makes it impossible for a rapid interchange of air in the hive; and during the very coldest 

 winter, says Dr. Phillips, the bees will be warm enough at any time, provided the hive is well packed, to 

 shove out the dead bees. Unless the hive is well packed, and that means bottom packing, the one-hole 

 entrance would clog up and kill the colony. 



the circulation of air. This incident led 

 Mr. Kindig, the following year, to try a 

 limited entrance in the form of a hole, not 

 knowing what the Government ex'perts had 

 been doing. He has been using the one-hole 

 entrance with the best results, but said 

 little or nothing about it because he sup- 

 j)0sed he was not orthodox and so had been 

 keeping still. 



At the field meet held in Michigan I had 

 quite a long talk with J. N. Harris of St. 

 Louis, who has for years been using %-inch 

 holes for entrances. To prevent mice from 

 getting in he drove a nail across the hole to 

 exclude the mice but not the bees. The 



One thing more: No matter whether the 

 slotted entrance or one consisting of a series 

 of holes is used, it is very important that 

 there be no doorstep or ledge to catch snow 

 and ice. We have tested this out to our 

 satisfaction, and some of the biggest bee- 

 keepers are emjjhatic in the statement that 

 doorstejis just beneath the entrances are 

 far worse than useless. 



From a theoretical point 'of view the 

 scheme of a one-hole entrance and a large 

 amount of packing looks good; but as it has 

 not been tried on a large scale by a large 

 number of beekeepers, I feel that we should 

 proceed carefully. 



