No. 2. 



Letter from a Bee-Keeper. 



67 



swarming'. I have had ihem hanging out for 

 a month together, for the bees do not know 

 the time when the queen will be ready to 

 swarm. Even when she is ready, they are 

 often kept back many days by clouds or 

 winds; and they are too wise to tire them- 

 selves by work on a day when they may have 

 a long journey to go in swarming. Not only 

 are they idle, but the other bees are forced to 

 feed them ; for every bee that goes off with a 

 swarm has his stomach full of honey, which 

 is taken from the common slock. By means 

 of the cap, you make those bees work who 

 would otherwise be idle. The cap must not 

 be larger than the size I have told you ; for 

 if you put on a full-sized hive, you give them 

 so much room, and make the hive so much 

 cooler, that they will not swarm at all. But 

 this cap will not make them swarm one day 

 later than thoy would otherwise do. Besides, 

 if the cap is too large, the queen will lay her 

 eggs there also; and when you take it ofT, 

 you will find black combs instead of virgin 

 honey. So much for the stocks which you 

 wish to swarm. 



I will now show you, that when you have once got 

 your stock up to its full nuuiber, it is much more pro- 

 filahlp to prevent t/ieir swarming. And as to the num- 

 ber of stocks, few cottagers keep enougti : tliere is hard- 

 ly more trouble in taking care of twenty stocks than 

 two. In Germany, I saw a man in a good honey coun 

 try who had 200. On the old plan of burning the bees, 

 a cottager's stock is sometimes targe, sometimes small. 

 After a bad honey year, he is often tempted to burn 

 many of his good old stocks, in order to make up by 

 numbers the same quantity of honey which in b.'tter 

 years he will get from few. Suppose he leaves three 

 stocks, of which two stand the winter, and the ne.vt 

 year turns out a very good bee year, he is then not 

 ready to make the most of it, and of cour.se only gets 

 one-tenth of the honey which lie would, if lie had twen- 

 ty stocks, as he ought to have. 



Man has nothing to do with the weather, as I said 

 before. All I can do is, to show you how you mav 

 make most use of a good year, get' a fair quantity of 

 honey in a middling year, and not lose all your bees in 

 a bad one. 290 lbs. have been taken from one stock, 

 without hurting the bees, by a method which I will 

 teach you, whilst the heaviest cottage hive I ever heard 

 of was under iOO lbs. I just now said, it is better not 

 to have swarms. If I with 10 stocks get fiO lbs. of ho- 

 iiey, which I easily can, from each, without destroying 

 one of my stocks, am not I better oflf at the end of the 

 year than you, whose ten stocks have all swarmed, and 

 who, when you take up all the swarms in the autumn, 

 think vourself well off if vou get 20 lbs. from each. You 

 get 200, I get GOO lbs. of honey. But 1 will show vou 

 how to be as well off as I am. I have said it is best to 

 prevent swarming : now hear the reason. The queen 

 bee lays from 10,000 to 30.000 eggs in the year. In a 

 stock containing ."JOOO bees, almost all of them in mid- 

 dling years will be busy in nursing the grubs, for they 

 are such n-ood mothers that they think it their first duty to 

 feed their youn^ ; gathering honey is their "second. A 

 swarin goes off- you have two queens, each with 3000 

 bees, busy in rearing the eggs which the two queens 

 lay all through the summer. They have no spare time 

 to gather honey, and so, in a had year, a stock with 

 plenty of b,?es in it will he often almost empty and 

 worthless when you take it up in the autumn, and 

 oometiines even die in the svmmer if it is not f(!d. 

 Now if you prevent swarming by giving them plenty of 

 room, 3000 bees, who were nurses before to the grubs 

 of one queen, will be enough to do the nursing work to 

 the hive, though it is so much larser; for each hive has 

 only one queen : and one queen cannot lay egss enough 

 to require more nurses, though two may. The other 

 3000 will store honey in the spare room you give them, 



which yon may take as I will show you. But before I 

 fully explain my method, as I am going to speak of 

 bottom boards, I will say that stone and slate stands 

 are very bad for bees. They are too cold ; the bees 

 which in the winter come down upon them get chilled, 

 and cannot get up again. Wooden bottom boards are 

 far best, as well as most handy. Look at figure 2: you 

 see a wooden bott(jm board with the door-way a cut in 

 it, (it is better to cut the entrance in the board, and not 

 in your bo.x, for by this means the wet of the box runs 

 down the slope of the wood.) You see it has another 

 entrance b on the box side. The dark mark is meant 

 to show where a box will stand on it. The other bot- 

 tom board is just like it, only the second doorway is on 

 the left side (the two doorways must be made to fit 

 each other when they are pushed close.) As soon as 

 your bees get so strong in May that they begin to hang 

 out, push the two boards close together. In the even, 

 ing when they are all in, shut up the front entrance a, 

 open the right-hand one b, and put an empty box on 

 the new board, with a glass in the back, and a hole, 

 one inch and a half over, on the top of it. Its place is 

 marked thin in the wood-cut. Each doorway has a bit 

 of tin laid over as much of it as juts out beyond the 

 hive. The bees will find no way out next morning, 

 and will be rather bothered at first by this change; but 

 if \ ou put the new doorway exactly where the old one 

 was, and rub the board with a little honey or sugared 

 beer, they will soon take to it. 



As their numbers increase, they will begin to build 

 combs in this new hive. As soon as it is full, you may 

 take it away in this manner. In the heat of the day, 

 when many bees arc out, slip a piece of tin or card be- 

 tween the two doorways : shut up the doorway e, and 

 open the old doorway a, after you have pushed it back 

 into its old place. If the bees go on working the rest 

 of the day all quietly, you will be sure that the queen 

 is in the old hive, and all is right. About half an hour 

 before dusk, open again the doorway c; and if, as you 

 suppose, the queen is in the old hive, the bees, fright- 

 ened by their long imprisonment, will hurry from one 

 doorway to another, to join her. As soon as most of 

 them have gone round, take away the full hive for 

 yourself. If the old hive is very uneasy all day, you 

 maybe sure that the queen is shut up in the newhive ; 

 if so, draw out the piece of card or tin, to join them 

 again, and wait till another day. Here you have a 

 good hive of honey made by bees which we have pre- 

 rented from swarming; from which if they had been 

 parted by swarming, you would, perhaps, have got 

 none. 



Figure 4 are wooden hives, g- is the middle box, into 

 which the bees are to be swarmed, and never after dis- 

 turbed. It may be as hot as they choose to make it ; 

 there the queen lays her eggs, there the nurse-bees do 

 their work, there they lay up honey sufficient to keep 

 them through the winter, there they sleep through the 

 « inter ; in short, it is their nursery, their feeding-room, 

 their palace, their home, their castle, for they must 

 nerer be disturbed there. The side-boxes A A, are only 

 barns, where they lay up their spare honey, and which 

 you may take as fast as they are filled. (In a good 

 honey year you will often get a box weighing 50 lbs. 

 early in June.) k k are the slides, which pull in and 

 out, and which open or shut the way from the centre 

 to the side-box. 



Always keep one of the side-boxes empty. As soon 

 as the one on the right hand gets pretty full of honey, 

 and the hive gets so hot that if you do not give them 

 more room they will soon swarm, pull out the slide, 

 and let the bees into the left hand box ; this will make 

 them cooler. As soon as they have taken to this new 

 barn, take the full one, empty it, and place it back, to 

 be used again as soon as the left hand one gets full. 

 The boxes must each be about eleven inches clear on 

 the inside by nine inches high. This is the best size 

 for common use. A square box is far better than a 

 round straw hive, as they can make all their combs 

 full sized, without any of the small and useless ones 

 with which they fill up the cottage hives. 



H'inter Place for Bees. — The place where you put 

 your bees in the winter is of no less matter. If they 

 are left in their summer place, fronting the sun, every 

 bright day, even in December, tempts them out. They 

 find nothing, are of course more hungry, and eat more 

 on their return. Many of them never get back ; when 

 they get out of the warm sun into the cold wind, they 

 fall stifT, and die. 



