142 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



After a little hesitation, we are able to report the glad 

 news that the bees have " gone up." While the queen 

 is busy downstairs refilling the cells that hatch out 

 there, the upper story is being filled with solid 

 honey. Soon we can lift it and place under it a 

 third box of frames. Next, we can take a story 

 away, throw out the honey, and give back the empty 

 combs to be refilled. Then, as summer wanes, we 

 take away the supers one by one, not returning them 

 when emptied, but keeping the fully drawn-out combs 

 for the bees to fill another year, thus saving the bees 

 still more of the labours they normally must pass 

 through before laying up honey. 



Bee-keeping carried to such feverish lengths 

 asking a hive, and even a swarm, of the year to give 

 us sixty pounds of honey in so poor a climate as 

 ours savours of sweating. It may be, though no 

 expert has said so, that some of the diseases that 

 devastate the apiaries have origin in the undue 

 extension of hive populations, an extension that 

 should mean attenuation and decrease of individual 

 vitality. The dread Isle of Wight disease does seem 

 to be a kind of nervous debility that might well be 

 reached by this means. Perhaps safety lies in the 

 observance of a maximum dividend of, say, thirty 

 pounds per hive. Perhaps wax-making is a healthy 

 pursuit that the bees ought not to be denied. 

 Certainly the contemplative man takes so much 

 pleasure in the natural activity of his bee that he 

 is little tempted to dabble in the hustling methods 

 of the ultra-expert. In America they even give the 

 bees a shaking now and then to wake them up and 

 set them more vigorously to work. As for the writer, 



