and its Economic Management. 241 
much larger frames of comb than the Association Standard 
are used in the stock chamber (such as will absorb the 
contents of three or four skeps), yet a smaller percentage 
of swarms will be found to come out. (5) Where bees 
take up their abode in the walls of old houses, under the 
weather boards or tiles, the combs are often so long (I have 
found them three feet in length) that the queen is not 
crowded, and the brood nest is, as it were, never complete. 
Under these conditions a swarm is seldom known to issue ; 
indeed I have not heard of one from the many stocks of this 
kind that have come under my notice. 
Following up this process of reasoning, and after experi- 
menting in various directions, I have found the most 
effective means of prevention to be that of providing a 
secondary-chamber, under the stock, and which is never 
filled’ with finished combs. This arrangement, as regards 
ordinary hives in connection with other essential features 
hereafter explained, constitutes the only method of pre- 
vention that can be founded upon those natural principles 
which govern the actions of the inmates of the hives. 
Simmins’ Non-Swarming System. 
This method of management was first made public by 
the exhibition of my Special Prize hive in 1878 at South | 
Kensington, and later by the issue of my pamphlet 
on the subject in February, 1886. An immense interest 
was created at the time, and many copies of the work were 
distributed by the late T. G. Newman, then editor of the 
American Bee Journal ; while large sales were effected in 
this and other countries. 
In that work I claimed that “ Mo colony im normal con- 
dition attempts to swarm unless it has all its brood combs 
completed”: and further: “To reduce the matter to a 
greater certainty, while admitting that bees may sometimes 
: R 
