ARTIFICIAL SWARMING. 239 



There is still another class who either keep bees or can 

 be induced to keep them, and who are anxiously inquiring 

 for some new hive or new plan by which, with little or no 

 trouble, they may reap copious harvests of the precious 

 nectar. This is emphatically the class to seize hold of 

 every new device, and waste their time and money to fill 

 the coffers of the ignorant or unprincipled. There never 

 will be a " royal road" to profitable bee-keeping. If there 

 is any branch of rural economy which more than all others 

 demands care and experience, for its profitable management, 

 it is the keeping of bees ; and those who have a painful 

 consciousness that the disposition to put off and neglect, was, 

 so to speak, born in them, and has never been got out of 

 them, will do well to' let bees alone, unless they hope, 

 by the study of their systematic industry, to reform evil 

 habits which are well nigh incurable. 



While I feel very sanguine that my system of manage- 

 ment will be used extensively and very advantageously, by 

 careful and skillful Apiarians, I know too much of the world 

 to expect that it will, with the masses, very speedily supercede 

 other methods, even if it were so absolutely perfect, as to ad- 

 mit of no possible improvement. 1 hope, however, that I 

 may, without being charged with presumption, be permitted 

 to put on record the prediction, that movalle frames will 

 in due season, be almost universally employed ; and this, 

 whether bees are allowed to swarm naturally, or are in- 

 creased by artificial meansjor are kept in hives in which they 

 are not expected to swarm at all. 



Note. — The very day on which I first contrived the plan, so perfect- 

 ly simple, and yet so efBcacious, of gaining the control of the combs 

 by these frames, I not only foresaw all the consequences which would 

 follow their adoption, but wrote as follows, in my Bee-Journal. " The 

 use of these frames will, I am persuaded, give a new impulse to the 

 easy and profitable management of bees ; and will render the making 

 of artificial swarms an easy operation." , 



