THE AMERICAN A PIC UL TURIS T. 



19 



fully, the hive must be made to storify. 

 That is, the brood chamber and sec- 

 tion and extracting supers must be made 

 to fit with ])ro])er bee spaces wherever 

 put, because in working these hives it will 

 often be required to place brood-cham- 

 bers of brood above the sections, and tlie 

 queen excluder will be placed where- 

 ever it will be of advantai^e to have it 

 in limiting the queen and in preventing 

 the building of nearly all burr-combs as 

 we do on these hives. 'I'he brood cham- 

 ber must be made light so as to be easi- 

 ly handled and as small as it can be 

 made to work well. I prefer to have it 

 made only y^ inches deep to carry a 7 

 inch brood frame and the capacity must 

 not be less than for 800 square inches 

 of brood comb. The one I use con- 

 tains 830 square inches of comb, and it 

 is as near the r ght size as we may ex- 

 pect to get. 



Now the reason we want such a brood- 

 chamber is because it is the utmost 

 limit of profitable contraction of the 

 brood-nest. This we have determined 

 after a larger experience, probably than 

 any other beekeej^er in America, in the 

 use of contracted brood-chambers, and 

 we happen to live in a locality where 

 without such contraction there is no 

 success in beekeeping. This brood- 

 chamber is also the best size for swarms, 

 and when two stories are used there is 

 no other hive its equal in successful 

 wintering and for building up powerful 

 colonies early in the spring for the white 

 clover harvest. 



But what are the objections to a large 

 brood-chamber, say the common 8 or 

 10 frame L. hive? And what are the 

 merits of the queen excluder? Well, 

 in the first place the 8 or 10 frame L. 

 hive is not large enough for spring 

 breeding; that is, the capacity is not 

 large enough to breed up a full col- 

 ony such as the average queen is ca- 

 pable of producing in a protected hive 

 before the harvest begins. Afterwards, 

 it will hold too much brood or too much 

 honey according to the disposition of 

 the queen to lay or the workers to store 



in the brood chamber. Some colonies 

 will rear during the harvest too much 

 brood and so consimie a good part of 

 their stores in rearing brood that will 

 hatch out too late to take part in the 

 gathering of the harvest, and as they 

 will be too old for winter, they are 

 worse tlian useless as they must eat to 

 live and so eat up a good part of the 

 stores that should remain for winter. 

 If the workers store too much honey in 

 the brood-chambers, crowding out the 

 queen, they will store little in the su- 

 pers and thus take from the profit of 

 the beekee])er. After the harvest the 

 bees will rear a large colony out of the 

 superabundance of their stores and con- 

 sume so much as to leave barely enough 

 for winter, by which means the princi- 

 pal part of the harvest of that colony is 

 lost to the beekeeper. Now the above 

 is where no swarming takes place. If 

 the bees swarm they will be put in a 

 new eight or ten frame hive the brood- 

 chamber of which is so l.irge that by the 

 time it is well filled, the harvest is about 

 over, and very little surplus is oDiained 

 except the season should be an unusu- 

 ally favorable one. The parent colony, 

 if it does not swarm again (in which 

 case it will be the worse for it) by the 

 time it gets ready to work again in the 

 supers the season is done, and the result 

 is no surplus worth the while on either 

 colony. The increase has cost a crop 

 of honey and the beekeeper pronounces 

 the season a failure. How common 

 this is every beekeeper who has used 

 such hives well knows. It is only an oc- 

 casional year that the keeping of bees 

 is profitable, and so the business falls into 

 disrepute or neglect. Now where is 

 the fault ? Why, sir, it is largely in the 

 hive and the inability of the average bee- 

 keeper to manage it with profit. The 

 expert beekeeper finding his bees to do 

 well at producing honey for extracting 

 gradually ceases to produce comb honey 

 and does not appear to know the cause 

 of his failure ; or if he does, the trouble 

 is too great to remedy with division 

 boards and dummies and a lot of other 



