CHAPTER XIII. 



Wintering and Spring Dwindling. 

 Wintering. 



619. Bees can be "wintered safely in nearly all climates, 

 where the Summer is long enough to enable them to store a 

 Winter supply. In the natural state, the vital heat of the 

 live hollow trees in which they dwell, helps to maintain a 

 higher temperature than that of the outside air, and bees 

 Winter so well in such abodes, that travelers, who visit North- 

 ern Russia, wonder how so small an insect can live in such 

 inhospitable countries. 



620. As soon as frosty weather arrives, bees cluster com- 

 pactly together in their hives, to keep warm. They do not 

 usually assemble on combs full of honey, but on the empty 

 comb just below the honey. They are never dormant, like 

 wasps and hornets, and a thermometer pushed up among them 

 will show a Summer temperature, even when, in the open air, 

 it is many degrees below zero. 



The bees in the cluster are imbricated, like the shingles of 

 a roof, each bee having her head under the abdomen of the 

 one above her, and so on, to the ones who are in reach of 

 the honey. These pass the honey to those below them, which 

 pass it to the next, and so on, to the bottom of the mass. 



621. When the cold becomes intense, they keep up an 

 incessant tremulous motion, in order to develop more heat* 



• Everybody knows that motion transforms itself into heat, and that 

 heat is but a form of motion. . . whether the motion comes from 



a large body or from a small one, whether this motion be suddenly 

 or gradually stopped, the result is the same, it is transformed into 

 heat. — (Flammarion, "Le Monde Avant la Creation de I'Homme.") 



340 



