36 The Townsend Bee Book 
usually commence to store honey in this location about May 20. 
With so much clustering room, such as these hives afford, no 
swarming fever will be induced. 
When the warm weather of the last part of May arrives, an 
upper story is given our medium to strong colonies, either with or 
without a queen-excluder, depending on whether it is a yard 
where excluders are used or not. Our honey season usually com- 
mences during the second or third week of June, in this location. 
As there is no honey-flow previous to the main clover flow in June, 
sufficient to cause bees to contract the swarming fever, the ten- 
frame hive used two-story during practically all of the hot weather 
previous to the honey-flow, keeps our bees practically free from 
the swarming fever, and without handling a single brood-comb. 
This system is well adapted to the eight-frame hive or smaller 
hives, only the second story should be of worker comb, and the 
queen allowed full sway through both stories. Later on, after the 
bees get to work in dead earnst, if one likes, the queen can be put 
down into the lower story, and an excluder placed on the lower 
story, since the bees have now almost forgotten there is such a 
thing as swarming, being so intent on the securing of the abun- 
dance of honey that ought to be coming at this time. Moreover, 
with the Italian bee this is the season of the year, or the season 
has now shaped itself so that one eight-frame story is all (and 
usually more than) the queen will occupy with the brood, because 
the bees are so intent on storing honey. 
This same principle of giving abundance of comb room during 
hot weather, previous to the main honey-flow, with the idea of 
preventing the bees from thinking about swarming, is carried out 
with our comb-honey as well as with our extracting colonies. 
In the case of the comb-honey bees, any empty brood-nests 
are used for the purpose of this extra room. Then we have pro- 
vided about half as many sets of shallow extracting-combs as we 
have colonies of bees in the yard, which are used to finish up the 
season in the production of comb honey, and also to give cluster- 
ing room previous to the season, as I have explained above. 
