FOREWORD 
. Tue author’s earliest recollections are of days with his 
grandfather among the bees. One of the proudest days of his 
whole life was the first time he was permitted to cut a limb 
from an apple tree on which a swarm had clustered. 
With a lifetime of intimate association with the bees and 
a wide acquaintance among the bee-keepers of the nation, it may 
not be regarded as surprising that he should undertake to set 
down in this book the information gleaned from so many sources. 
In no other pursuit, perhaps, do the originators’ names cling 
to the articles of equipment or methods of manipulation, as in 
bee-keeping. Most of the articles of equipment, as well as 
methods in common use, bear the name of the man with whom 
they originated—the Langstroth hive, Porter bee escape, .\lex- 
ander feeder, Root smoker, Miller queen cage, and so on through- 
out the entire field of apiculture. So firmly established has this 
custom become, that a writer is in danger of being accused of 
plagiarism if he describes a method without the originator’s name 
in connection. While the author has followed the usual custom, 
in the main, some methods have become so generally adopted 
that it hardly seems necessary to continue the practice. It is 
not with any intention of claiming as original any of these plans 
that the originator’s name has occasionally been omitted, but 
rather because it does not seem needful with matters so fully 
credited already. 
While the author believes that a few minor methods herein 
described are original with him, this book is not presented for 
the purpose of exploiting original material, but rather to de- 
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