128 ONE YEAR AMONG THE BEES. 



in a house. The first and most important thing is, that you are al- 

 most entirely safe from bee stings. Bees will scarcely attempt to 

 sting you in a building, and you will certainly get ten chances of be- 

 ing stung outdoors to one in a building, at the least estimate. You 

 can handle bees in any kind of weather in the house, and as you are 

 entirely out of the wind you can do your work much better. You are 

 never bothered with robber bees poking in the hives when you have 

 them open, and every apiarist knows how difficult it is to manipulate 

 bees out of the honey season 011 account of robber bees. And for the 

 same reason you can remove honey from the hives, change the section 

 boxes of honey about, and handle the honey by putting it up in pack- 

 ages, and extract out of season ; all this work is performed, and no 

 robber bees to bother you. Occasionally we will have some bees in- 

 side when handling them ; but place bee escapes on the windows, or 

 in absence of this a few holes or cracks in the wall, or even a door 

 open a minute, will cause them all to fly out. If the house is so that 

 you can darken it to some extent by closing the doors and windows, 

 the bees that are inside will in an instant hunt a hole to get out. You 

 can thus clear the house of bees at once, and it would surprise you 

 how quickly they will go. Wire screen should of course be on win- 

 dows, doors, and all openings. By turning a key in the door your 

 whole apiary and all implements are secure from thieves, and espe- 

 cially is this of great advantage when apiaries are kept away from 

 home. 



Another inexpensive way of keeping bees, and also a way in which 

 to obtain nearly all the advantages of the house apiary, is to construct 

 a small building ten feet long, six feet wide, and six feet high. This 

 will accommodate eleven colonies of bees five on each side and one 

 at the end. On each side, where the hives sit, should be a floor of 

 boards, and the center where you stand to operate should be ground 

 floor. I have used two tiers of hives in such a building, thus having 

 twenty-two colonies in it, but it is not convenient for handling the 

 upper tier, and I would not recommend it. Houses like this will not 

 cost any more than chaff hives enough for the eleven colonies, and is 

 superior for winter use, as the entire building may be filled with 

 chaff, or used in any quantity desired. House apiaries, as usually 

 constructed, are very long buildings, and the result is, that the bees 

 become lost as to their proper place of entering ; the hives at the ends 

 of building get the most of the stray bees thus, and these hives be- 

 come very strong, while the hives in the center of building become 

 weakened. This has always been a strong argument against house 

 apiaries ; but on the plan above given, not having more than a dozen 

 hives facing one direction on the same line, obviates this difficulty 



