86 THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW 



spell of winter which will pretty surely come, and I feel quite sure they 

 will survive, although light in bees, and I regret that this above clump 

 of bees could not have gone below and joined them, but late w^eather 

 conditions prevented. The upper bunch was nicely clustered, with 

 their heads all pointed upwards and w^ith their wings all locked over 

 each other as shingles on a roof, so if they could have had six inches 

 more honey above them they would have weathered the winter. An 

 important lesson that bee-men should learn is that bees between 

 two combs only travel upward during cold weather. They could not 

 stand on their heads for three or four months or lie on their sides, 

 so any stores to be available for them during the cold w^eather must 

 be above them. Bees left to themselves always store it, but where 

 they are in a single shallow hive body, they are not provided with 

 adequate storage capacity above them to carry stores to make it safe 

 and sure to get them through our severe winters, and I wonder more 

 and more that so many bees get through in those shallow hives. But 

 it is bad enough when, only a few years ago, 75% of all the bees in 

 the northern states died, the loss being millions. 



In discussing the wintering question with George E. Hilton, our 

 famous brother bee-keeper, he said that nine-tenths of the bees that 

 have died have died of starvation, nearly all of which might have 

 been saved had the bees been in double hives so as to have allowed 

 storage room above them where it would be available for them during 

 cold weather. 



Now w^hat are the lessions we learned from this wanter examina- 

 tion made possible by having the bees in a house? The first is that 

 the upper cluster died because there were no more stores above them, 

 but abundance below them, and that the other cluster down in the 

 bottom of this five-story hive were all right and would have been 

 all right till spring, because they had plenty of stores above them 

 to eat up into notwithstanding this enormous space above them, and 

 that they were only in single-walled hives and had gone through three 

 or four spells of near zero weather. Our double snug down packers 

 would have expected to have found them all dead, but I hope and fully 

 expect that this light cluster will weather February and March as 

 well as they have gone through the past ninety days, because we 

 saw to it that they had ample good sealed stores to cat up into. We 

 then examined a large fine colony in double hives up in the loft, as 

 we feared a mouse had gotten in. There was no mouse, but we took 

 out all the frames and found that they had already started brood, so 

 there will be no spring dwindling there, as there wnW be young bees 

 coming out soon after Valentine's day, and it will get to be an enor- 

 mous swarm by the time the honey harvest gets here, so they w^ould 



do some business. 



(To be continued.) 



