FIFTY YEARS AMONG THE BEES 139 



NO EXCLUDER UNDER SECTIONS. 



"Before putting on the super, would you advise me 

 to put a queen-excluder (Fig. 56 ) over the brood-cham- 

 ber?" It would increase the space between the brood- 

 combs and the sections, and in that way would be a 

 further help toward prevention of dark cappings on the 

 sections, and it would make a sure thing as to preventing 

 burr-combs on the bottoms of the sections. But I don't 

 believe there would be enough advantage in both ways to 

 pay for the excluders. 



I think I hear you say, "But wouldn't it pay to u.se 

 excluders for the sake of keeping the queen out of the 

 supers?" I may reply that the queen so seldom goes up 

 into a siper that not one section in a hundred, sometimes 

 not more than one in a thousand, will be found troubled 

 with brood. So on the whole I hardly think that all the 

 advantages to be gained from using excluders would pay 

 for the time and trouble of using them. I need not con- 

 sider so very much the cost of them, for I have a lot on 

 hand lying idle. At one time I thought I had a plan for 

 prevention of swarming by the use of excluders, and was 

 so sanguine about it that I got 150 of them. I think a 

 great deal of queen-excluders, and wouldn't like to do 

 without them, but I did not need 150 of them, for my ex- 

 cluder-swarm-prevention plan did not turn out to be a 

 howling success. 



EXPERIMENTING ON TOO LARGE SCALE. 



Allow me to digress long enough to confess that one 

 of my weaknesses is being a little too sanguine about new 

 plans while they are yet in the raw, and so experimenting 

 on too large a scale. More than one crop of honey has 

 been lessened by means of some foolish project that I 

 thought might increase the crop. But I haven't done as 

 badly as I might have done, for my good wife has acted 

 somewhat as a balance-wheel, advising me to "go slow^" 

 and not experiment on too large a scale, and she has al- 



