The Townsend Bee Book 43 
By following this plan, whole yards of bees have been worked 
for extracted honey through the whole season, without a single 
swarm issuing. It can be seen that powerful colonies need more 
room during the period just before and during the fore part of the 
white-honey flow than is provided in the ordinary hive in use to- 
day, and the above plan shows at least one method that may be 
employed with regular hives to provide this extra room at a time 
when it is necessary. Of course, when this time is past, the hive 
is brought back again to its normal size. 
In the fall of the year 1906, during the early part of the buck- 
wheat flow, our Pine Lake yard of 100 colonies was left without 
upper stories until the hives were crammed full of this early buck- 
wheat honey for winter stores. At this time some of the most. 
advanced colonies built comb and stored honey on the outside of 
the hives, and some of them must have had as much as 35 pounds 
of honey in the hive when they went into winter quarters. This 
was more honey then we were in the habit of leaving, and was even 
more than a ten-frame hive could hold and still leave room for the 
colony to breed up in the spring. The consequences were that, 
when the upper stories were given in May, 1907, before the honey 
season opened, these bees in the Pine Lake yard carried a few 
pounds of this buckwheat honey in the brood-nest into the upper 
story to make room for the queen below, with the result that, when 
the honey was extracted, it was amber in color and had to be sold 
for one cent a pound less than the rest, which contained no dark 
honey. This is the only case of the kind that has come to my 
notice, and even this would not have happened under normal cir- 
cumstances. 
When I first began to produce extracted honey the plan then 
in vogue was to lift a frame of brood into the upper story to start 
the bees to work there immediately. While this was successful 
so far as getting the bees to work in the supers was concerned, yet 
it was a noticeable fact that the honey produced by this plan was 
never quite as good in color as when no brood was lifted above. 
I soon learned that it is not necessary to lift brood above to get 
the bees to working in the supers, drawn combs being found suf- 
ficient. Now, in lifting this frame of brood into the upper story 
there was always more or less honey from the previous season 
lifted with it, which honey was often gathered from buckwheat. 
This brought about the same result as that outlined above, and 
the off grade of honey being not to my liking the system was aban- 
doned. This is the worst feature about the Chapman system, for 
the old honey that is likely to be lifted up with the brood causes all 
