ONE YEAR AMONG THE BEES. 121 



her. Queens, on account of bad wings, cannot fly with the swarm, 

 and this occurs very often. They come out and crawl off on the 

 ground, and sometimes are lost entirely. In this case, of course, the 

 swarm returns also. When the queen comes out with the swarm and 

 cannot fly, as in this case, the bees very frequently find her, as the odor 

 of queens is very attractive to the bees, and if you are very careful to 

 look all around in the vicinity where the swarm has been you may see 

 a little handful of bees gathered up in a ball ; then you can almost set 

 it down as a certainty that the queen is inside the ball. 



In case of swarms returning, they may be hived readily by removing 

 the parent hive after the swarm has come out and putting an empty 

 hive in its place, and the bees will walk right into the new one. But 

 they must have a queen, and you can hunt out their own queen and 

 put her in with them, providing she remained in the parent hive. The 

 parent hive is then in the same condition as if the swarm came off 

 with the queen, and it can be placed back at its old stand and the 

 new one removed elsewhere. 



In the above we speak of old queens only, and of first swarms, as 

 the old queens always come with the first swarms ; but second swarms 

 containing young virgin queens are also guilty of the same tricks, and 

 it is more like "tricks" with them, for they are active on the wing. 

 More than one virgin queen may come with second swarms, as they 

 emerge from the cells several in number at the time of the swarm's 

 issuing ; and right here is a nice little thing to make a note of. The 

 young queens are kept imprisoned in their cells by the bees, and but 

 one of them allowed at liberty in the hive, to prevent their killing 

 each other ; they thus keep them in their cells until the swarm is ready 

 to come off, at which time they seem to allow them their liberty, or at 

 least let a portion of them come out, and in this manner several of 

 them may come out with the swarm, and thus come out, too, not being 

 out of their cell perhaps five minutes. Or, in other words, we may say 

 they swarmed with the bees, not being over five minutes old. But in 

 this case the queens were kept imprisoned maybe twelve or twenty- 

 four hours, or even longer, after they matured and were ready to come 

 out. In all cases of second or after swarms thus having several 

 queens issue from the hive with them, they settle down to business 

 with but one queen, and the others will be found dead at the entrance 

 of the hive a few hours later. 



PUTTING HIVES TOGETHER. 



The illustration ( 18 ) for putting hives together, and getting them 

 perfectly square and exactly to the place before nailing them, explains 

 itself. It is made of two-by-four stuff, well braced and spiked, and is 

 readily made with ordinary tools, and can be made by any one. The 



