38 PRACTICAL BEE-KEEPING. 



this sprinkling, a wine bottle, having a notch ont in the cork after the 

 plan of the vinegar bottle upon the stall of the itinerant shellfish monger, 

 will be very convenient, and enable the operator to drop with measured 

 force the sweet libations between the combs. 



In open driving, the akeps need not be of the same diameter ; indeed, on 

 one occasion, we found ourselves on a visit where a few stocks of bees were 

 kept, and having consented to make an artificial swarm to fill a wooden 

 hive with a fixed bottom, we could discover nothing better to receive the 

 bees than a, lady's chip bonnet box. The iaside was well scored with a 

 pen-knife to give the swarm foothold, and in a few minutes the whole was 

 with perfect success accomplished. 



Box hives, we are often told, cannot be driven, but if the bees be pre- 

 pared as we have explained, getting them both gorged and warm, a box 

 can be cleared of its bees in a few minutes. Indeed, drumming for twenty 

 minutes upon a hive, caught up immediately after smoking, will not 

 usually drive as many bees as two minutes' drumming will dislodge 

 from one in proper condition. A well-known writer on apicultural 

 matters tells us that the bees run up to escape the distressing jarring 

 of their combs, kept up by beating upon their hive walls. Were this 

 exactly correct, we think they would run down to the hive crown, where 

 the combs are attached, and where, consequently, the jar is the least, 

 and the relative distances of the comb not interfered with. We take 

 it to be simple matter of instinct ; frightened bees instinctively run 

 upwards, and so retreat normally from the edges and exposed portions 

 of their combs. We cheat them while drumming by inverting the order, 

 of things. If a skep be rapped a few times with a stick, the bees will be 

 found, if we lift it, to have run up, and to be filling themselves from the 

 open honey cells. With the skep, the impossibility of removing its crown 

 is the only impediment to its being drummed in situ, as the following 

 example will illustrate : One of our swarms in 1871 built so irregularly in 

 an ordinary Woodbury hive, that the removal of any single comb was 

 impracticable. In order to accomplish the re-arrangement of the Interior, 

 it was essential to lift out aJl the combs and frames in one piece, and this 

 necessitated the previous removal of the bees. The crown board was 

 taken off, the colony gorged, and and an empty Woodbury, without its 

 bottom board, placed upon it. A few minutes rapping sent almost every 

 bee into the upper hive, which, with its forced awarm, occupied the old 

 stand, while the straightening process was in progress. 



We have said that beating upon the hive from " one to five minutes " 

 will cause the bees to ascend, but with very weak and poor stocks, or in 

 cold weather, this time is often much exceeded, and sometimes with a con- 

 junction of the unfavourable conditions stated, the bees utterly refuse to 

 leave ; in this case they may be got out by throwing. The skep is held be- 

 tween the hands at the rim, the fingers within and the thumbs without, when. 



