216 THE HIVE AND HONEY-BEE. 



mize room, and to give easier access to his setting hens, he 

 had partitioned a long box into a dozen or more separate 

 apartments. The hens, in returning to their nests, were 

 deceived by the similarity of the entrances, so that often 

 one box contained two or three unamiable aspirants for 

 the honors of maternity, while others were entirely for- 

 saken. Many eggs were broken, more were addled, and 

 hardly enough hatched to establish one mother as the 

 happy mistress of a flourishing family. Had he left his 

 hens to their own instincts, they would have scattered 

 their nests, and gladdened his eyes with a numerous off- 

 spring. ' . - ' 



Through the length and breadth of our land, bee- 

 keepers who suffer heavy losses, from the proximity -and 

 similarity of their hives, unsuspicious of the true cause of 

 their misfortunes, impute them to the bee-moth, or some 

 of the many enemies of the bee. Judge Fishback, of 

 Batavia, Ohio, informed me, in the Fall of 1854, while on 

 a visit to his large Apiary, that he had for many years 

 guarded against the loss of young queens, by painting the 

 fronts of his hives of different colors, and making their 

 entrances face in various ways.* Every bee-keeper, 

 whose hives are so arranged that the young queens are 

 liable to make mistakes, must count upon heavy losses. 

 If he puts a number of hives, under circumstances similar 

 to those described, upon a bench, or the shelves of a bee- 

 house, he can never keep their number good without con- 

 stant renewal. The first swarms, and those stocks which 

 do not swarm, as they retain their fertile queens, will do 

 well enough ; but many of those that swarm will be robbed 



* John Mills, in a work published at London, in 1766, gives (p. 93) the following 

 directions : " Forget not to paint the months of yonr colonies with different colors, 

 as red, white, blue, yellow, &c., in form of a half-moon, or square, that the bees 

 may the better know their own home." Such precautions preserved the stocks 

 from becoming queenless, although they were not adopted for that end. 



