BEE 



652 



BEE 



honey or perform their other duties, and a 

 constant buzzing is to be heard. Then on a 

 bright, \\ann day one of the queens, usually 

 the old 01. from tin- hive, followed 



by a part, Mum-times more than half, of the 

 swarm, and after a short flight settles on some 

 . frequently the limb of a tree. Scouts 

 are sent out to find a new dwelling place, and 

 the bee-keeper may lose his swarm unless he 

 has ready at hand a new hive which they can 

 be induced to enter. Here they set up house- 

 keeping on precisely the same methods as in 

 the old hive. 



:i while the new queen, having surveyed 

 her domain, issues for a flight, but the workers 

 know that she will return, and do not follow 

 her. Very high into the clear air she flies, 

 and the males, who are hovering over the 

 fields, see her and follow, but so lofty is her 

 flight that only the strongest can keep up 

 with her. The mating takes place high in the 

 air; the drone dies within a few minutes, and 

 the queen comes back to the hive, never to 

 leave it again except for swarming. As many 

 as three successive swarms may issue from a 

 hive in one season, but a bee-keeper tries to 

 prevent frequent swarming, for new colonies 

 have to spend so much time storing up honey 

 to feed the young that they have little to 

 spare for the gathering of the surplus which 

 makes the bee-keeper's profit. 



Wintering. The drones, as stated above, are 

 killed at the approach of winter, that they 

 may not need to be fed on the stored-up 

 honey. Not nearly so many eggs are laid, and 

 all the activities of the hive slacken. But 

 bees do not hibernate in the sense of remain- 

 ing dormant during cold weather, and they 

 must therefore eat, but not nearly so plenti- 

 fully as during more active seasons. A fairly 

 large bee colony should have at the beginning 

 of the winter from twenty-five to thirty pounds 

 of sealed honey if it is to remain in good con- 

 dition until spring. 



Bee-Keeping. Brought from Europe cen- 

 turies ago, bee-culture has made great strides 

 in North America, where millions and millions 

 of pounds of honey are sold annually. The 

 large proportion of this is produced in the 

 large apiaries, as places for the keeping of bees 

 are called, but many people keep a few hives 

 to provide themselves with a delicious luxury 

 and to have the pleasure of studying the in- 

 teresting insects. No longer are hives of the 

 old regulation "beehive" shape common; 

 square boxes with removable frames have 



found to be far more satisfactory. The 

 lower part of tin? hive is given up to brood- 

 c-ells and those in which the bees store honey 

 for their own use, but above is a shallower 

 story, known as the super, into which are fitted 

 "section-holders" which hold in place the liltfe 

 square boxes or frames in which comb-honey 

 is placed on the market. Not until the stor- 

 age cells in the brood-chamber are filled should 

 the bees be allowed to begin storing honey in 

 the section-boxes. In each of these little 

 squares, at the center of the top as it stands 

 on edge, is placed a small piece of comb as a 

 foundation or suggestion to the bees as to 

 where to start. 



The raising of bees for commercial purposes 

 is not a simple matter of placing a hive in a 

 suitable place and a swarm of bees w r ithin it. 

 The bee-keeper must learn innumerable things 

 about the habits of the little creatures and 

 the method of handling them. He must know 

 how to prevent the development of queens 

 and the resultant swarming at wrong seasons; 

 how to induce his bees at just the right time 

 to begin storing in the supers, how to protect 

 them from enemies (see below), and from the 

 winter cold. Numerous books have been writ- 

 ten to teach the principles of bee-keeping, and 

 an attractive one of the smaller, less technical 

 sort is Anna B. Comstock's How to Keep 

 Bees. Nothing but really keeping bees, how- 

 ever, can satisfactorily teach. Hives made 

 almost entirely of glass may be procured, and 

 through the transparent sides the interested 

 observer can watch all the motions of the busy 

 little socialists, tracing a bee, from the time 

 it enters the hive, through all its varied 

 activities. 



Bee Enemies. In winter, when the bees are 

 torpid, mice sometimes enter the hive and 

 feed upon wax, honey and bees, but the worst 

 enemy is much smaller and more inconspicu- 

 ous. This is the larva of the wax moth, which 

 does its work in darkness and silence, digging 

 through the cells, wasting the honey and de- 

 vouring the young, undeveloped bees. Some- 

 times a whole swarm is ruined by this pest, 

 for as the old bees die out there are none to 

 take their places. There seems to be no way 

 of guarding against these wax moths except by 

 keeping the hives in good repair so that the 

 egg-laying females cannot find their way 

 inside. 



But disease is a worse enemy of bees than 

 any animal or insect pest. Two diseases, known 

 as European and American foul brood, affect 



