180 



THE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER. 



fuse flow of nectar takes place. We 

 sometimes hear bee-keepers complain- 

 ing loudly because the bees " crowded 

 the queen." This is simply an effort 

 on the part of nature to suppress 

 brood-rearing at a time when the 

 workers should be entirely free to 

 bend their entire strength to the one 

 essential end — the prompt reaping of 

 the honey harvest. And again, when 

 a swarm issues the parent colony has 

 a respite from brood rearing, for 

 eighteen or twenty days, and this gives 

 the workers a chance to secure a supply 

 of honey, an important thing which 

 they could not accomplish in their 

 weakened condition, if the usual 

 amount of brood was on hand to be 

 fed and nursed. If you will observe 

 along this line you will discover that 

 very few bee-keepers understand these 

 friendly efforts of nature in extending, 

 as it were, a helping hand to the 

 workers right at the time for which all 

 times in the bee interest were made — 

 the time of the honey flow. If the work- 

 ers loose this precious period of time, 

 unlike the song of "hard times," " it 

 comes back not again." 



These are broad hints to the intelli- 

 gent apiarist here, but it really seems 

 that few are able to grasp them. I 

 have noticed that when I have dis- 

 cribed my methods of working double 

 colonies, the true gist of the thing has 

 not been grasped by even a small 

 majority of trained bee men. When 

 I have described my method of putting 

 the brood above the queen excluder, 

 and hiveing the swarm below the 

 queen excluder, after taking away the 

 old queen and giving a queen cell in 

 her place below the excluder, quite 

 a number of innocent bee men have 

 written me, proposing to teach me a 



better plan, that is, the plan of giving 

 the double colony a " laying queen at 

 once," in the place of the queen cell. 



How innocent some people are ! 

 Why sir. the essential feature of the 

 plan is that part of the manipulation 

 that saves the waste of time necessary 

 to feed and rear a lot of brood right 

 in the busy honey harvest. In the 

 hives containing my double colonies 

 there is plenty of brood to take the 

 colonies over till young queens can be 

 reared and mated. If young laying 

 queens were given in the place of the 

 cells. ihe manipulation would be worse 

 than a failure. These "hints" are 

 written to encourage experiment in 

 manipulation of bees and bee hives. 

 But it must be remembered that good, 

 plain, well made hives and fixtures 

 are necessary to profitable manipula- 

 tion, and these may be had from The 

 W. T. Falconer Man'f'g Co. I have 

 examined their work and pattern of 

 hives etc., and can freely recommend 

 them. 



< 'hristianburg, Ky. 



What I Have Observed, Etc. 



BY T. K. MASSIE. 



(CONTINUED.) 



The cubic inches of comb space oc- 

 cupied by ten Simplicity frames, as I 

 calculate it, are, as previously stated, 

 about one-third the number contained 

 in the gum. Two supers of sections 

 take up 817 inches of comb in depth. 

 Deduct this from the length of comb 

 in a gum, 25 in., and we have 16^ in. 

 in depth for the brood frames, twice 

 as much, lacking ^ in., as the Simplic- 

 ity hive affords, and it is almost equal 

 to two Simplicity brood chambers. By 

 experiment I find that I can get more 

 comb honey by contracting to eight 

 frames, but I am satisfied that any 



