1898 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



/:-\ 



'M^sp^^. 



LARGE HIVES. 

 Single-story Large, versus Two-story Eight-frame. 



BY C. p. DADANT. 



A/r. Editor: — I have now come to the hard- 

 est portion of my argument. 



When Greek meets Greek, then comes the tug of 



war. 

 But when you and Dr. Miller join Plutchinson 

 and Taylor and Doolittle against me, where 

 shall I be ? The worst of it is, you have a 

 chance to talk just as soon as I have done, 

 and so destroy the effect of my arguments. 

 Then the other fellows thrust at me between 

 times. I wonder how much there will be left 

 of what I have to say, by the time you all get 

 through tearing it up. Dr. Miller doesn't 

 say much; but, although he claims never to 

 know, he always seems to me to give the hard- 

 est arguments in the fewest words. 



No, I can't agree vdth you in double stories 

 of small hives. Dr. Miller's way of putting 

 the second story under the first is certainly 

 the best; but even that does not satisfy me as 

 well as my own way of having it all in one 

 story, expansible at will. You must remem- 

 ber that I speak of a hive as long as the Lang- 

 stroth, or longer, and about 2 ^< inches deeper, 

 with a movable partition-board, or dummy, 

 and containing 10 frames. This hive, as I 

 have already explained, is of a capacity that 

 will about accommodate the most prolific 

 queens. 



Your eight-frame hive is too small ; and 

 when it is doubled, it is too laige for the lay- 

 ing of the most prolific queens. If you put 

 the additional story on top, you increase 

 the room too much all at once. This has to 

 be done at a time when the bees need all the 

 heat they can generate, and a large space 

 above them is not prone to help them, as you 

 will readily recognize. Dr. Miller makes the 

 addition at the bottom, and so does away with 

 that objection. The queen will then spread 

 her brood downward. But if you are aiming 

 to raise comb honey, as the queen goes down- 

 ward, as a matter of course the bees will fill 

 the space above them with honey as the brood 

 hatches, and the result will be from twenty to 

 an indefinite number of pounds placed in these 

 combs before the sections are touched. So 

 Dr. Miller lays himself more liable than my- 

 self to the objection of our critics, that our 

 large hives are not fitted for the raising of 

 comb honey. As a matter of course, the same 

 objection works equally well if we put the 

 second hive on top. The fact is plain, that 

 you have more room in your two hives than 

 can possibly be needed by one queen, and 

 that the remaining space must be filled with 

 honey before the sections are filled. If your 

 hive is exceedingly strong, you will probably 

 harvest enough more honey to still render 



your course more rational than that followed 

 by those who insist on cramping the queen, 

 however prolific, in a narrow compass ; but 

 there will be cases when your judgment will 

 have erred, and the queen will not prove equal 

 to the task, and in these cases your crop of 

 comb honey will be null unless there is abso- 

 lutely no brood in one of the two stories, and 

 you perceive it in time to remove it. My way 

 is plainly the best, for I increase or decrease 

 the room only as fast as needed, one comb at 

 a time if necessary; and when the hive is at 

 its full capacity, if the queen can fill it I have 

 it all in one compact mass, and have a greater 

 surface on top of the brood-chamber for supers. 

 That is, more bees can ascend to the super at 

 one time ; and that super with a greater ca- 

 pacity is nearer to the brood than one of the 

 same size with your two-story hive. We all 

 know how important it is in the spring to 

 have the supers close to the brood. My hive 

 is not so top-heavy, thus less liable to tip 

 accidentally. If the queen does not prove 

 equal to the emergency, and does not fill all 

 the combs, there is no difficulty in contracting 

 the brood-chamber by removing the combs 

 that have no brood, to the size wanted by our 

 friends, the lovers of contraction and other 

 methods. With your small hives you have 

 no division-board or dummy; or if you have 

 one it is in the honey-house, piled under a lot 

 of other traps, because you use it only in ex- 

 traordinary circumstunces. Mine is always 

 here in the hive, for I have one space espe- 

 cially reserved for that purpose ; and without 

 this dummy, as I said before, our hive would 

 have a capacity for 11 frames and not 10. So 

 the reducing of the capacity of the brood- 

 chamber is only a moment's work. 



Now, don't understand me as advising con- 

 traction, for I don't. I want only to increase 

 the capacity of the brood-chamber (if it is not 

 fully occupied already by a populotis colony ) 

 as fast as needed, and then leave it till the 

 summer is over. If I raised comb honey I 

 would not object to a few pounds of honey 

 more than needed in the brood-combs ; for I 

 should expect to use an extractor whenever I 

 saw the need of it. When raising extracted 

 honey, however, there is no fear of too much 

 honey below, if plenty of empty comb has 

 been given above when the harvest was on, 

 and the bees have not had to wait. I have 

 seen the time when it was necessary to crowd 

 the bees a little to get them to put enough 

 honey for winter in the brood-chamber. 



I believe I have said somewhere already 

 that we have tried double brood-chambers for 

 extracting, and we did not like them. The 

 addition of a full story, all at one time, unless 

 it is on a hive that has already been given all 

 the room the queen could fill, and is, there- 

 fore, very populous, seems to me more than 

 needed. The queen also seems to be inore 

 readily attracted to a large body of this kind, 

 and to desert the lower hive. Sometimes she 

 will breed in both apartments; and when one 

 tries to find frames full of honey they have to 

 be taken from the sides, or combs of brood 

 have to be extracted, which makes a possibil- 

 ity of throwing some of the grubs out into the 



