20 



THE AMERICAN BEE-KEEPER. 



ginners and others who do not possess 

 the requisite skill for in-door winter- 

 ing will ordinarily be successful with 

 the out-door plan. 



The colonies of the home apiary can 

 remain year after year, and winter up- 

 on the same stands ; and where one 

 can afford it, an out-apiary of chaff 

 hives does away with hauling bees in 

 the spring or fall. The chaff hive is 

 always preferred, even for a cold day 

 in the late spring or early summer, 

 whereas single walled hives sometimes 

 give rather meager protection after 

 setting out. The out-door colonies in 

 chaff hives have been used to the rig- 

 ors of winter; but the in-door colonies, 

 being set out about the middle of 

 April or last of May, many times re- 

 ceive a set-back that takes them all 

 summer to get over, by an unexpected 

 cold wave. The disadvantages are: 

 The first cost of hives. Every begin- 

 ner, not knowing whether he can 

 make the business successful or not, 

 wishes to start out as economically as 

 possible, and accordingly is in a quan- 

 dry as to whether he shall go 10 a 

 greater expense and purchase chaff 

 hives, or be more moderate and pur- 

 chase the single walled hives. It seems 

 to be generally agreed, that colonies 

 in-doors consume less stores than those 

 out — just how much less nobody seems 

 to know exactly ; some think half the 

 stores or over, others a third. Chaff 

 hives, as I have already stated, are 

 rather heavy and un wieldly ; and in 

 swarming, too, it becomes necessary 

 many times to change the location of 

 the hives. One person can hardly 

 handle a chuff hive without the aid of 

 a wheelborrow, while he can. with 

 comparative ease, cany a single walled 

 hive wherever he pleases. It some- 



times happens that a bee-keeper dis- 

 covers that a certain district is yield- 

 ing for a time considerable nectar, 

 while at home his bees are doing noth- 

 ing. He desires to carry a large num- 

 ber of colonies to the place in ques- 

 tion as soon as possible, to catch the 

 flow. If he had chaff hives, he can 

 not very well carry more than five or 

 six at a time in a wagon ; whereas he 

 can load twenty-five or thirty single 

 walled hives, and when the flow has 

 ceased he can take them to another 

 place. 



In these days of out-apiaries, chaff 

 hives have the very disagreeable fea- 

 ture of being non-portable, or practi- 

 cally so. Experienced bee-keepers 

 will winter in the cellar with perhaps 

 less loss of bees and less consumption 

 of stores than outdoors ; and this 

 brings me to the subject of Wintering 

 in Cellars or Special Repositories. 



Years ago the cellars and special 

 repositories became, all at once, very 

 popular, and bee-keepers all over our 

 land, especially in the northern local- 

 ities, invested much labor and money 

 in constructing good frost-proof cel- 

 lars, or sawdust packed buildings 

 above the ground. But a few years 

 later, when the spring dwindling, as it 

 has been called, made its appearance, 

 I made the discovery that bees taken 

 out in March, in fair order, would 

 often, in spite of me, become reduced 

 before the end of April to a mere 

 handful, and then perish outright or 

 leave their hives and swarm out. I 

 had two colonies last spring come 

 through in snch a bad condition that 

 they dwindled to about one pint each, 

 and they swarmed out and went into 

 one of my other colonies and were all 

 killed at once. These two colonies I 



