ALEXANDER’S WRITINGS ON PRACTICAL BEE CULTURE 15 
season in 25 years, while some of my neighbors complain of a poor sea- 
son nearly every summer, 
SECOND-HAND HONEY PACKAGES. 
I almost beg of you not to buy second-hand packages to ship ex- 
tracted honey in. Don’t use those poor packages. If you do, you not 
only bear down the market price of honey but you indirectly raise the 
freight rate. 
Don’t bother with starters of comb foundation in your breeding 
or extracting frames; but put in full sheets of foundation and prevent 
your bees from building that worst nuisance of the aplary—namely, 
drone comb. The man with a few colonies may have time to fuss with 
starters; but if you have many hives to care for, the sooner you cut 
out this starter business, and the shifting around the apiary of brood, 
the better it will be for your net income. The earlier in the spring you 
can have every hive in your apiary, and every comb in those hives filled 
with worker brood, then keep them so to the end of the season, the 
less reason you will have to worry about poor honey seasons and over- 
stocking. We have never had a strong colony of bees backed up with 
a hive full of worker brood fail to give us a good surplus. 
PREPARING FOR WINTER. 
Don’t neglect to prepare your bees early in the season for winter. 
This part of the business should here at the north be all finished 
before September 10. To a certain extent we are preparing our bees 
all summer for the next season; then when the final finish comes, the 
last of August, we have but little to do, and I am sure that they will 
winter with less loss if they have a chance to quiet down and are 
undisturbed during the fall months. 
Don’t try to winter weak colonies. If you are anxious to save all 
you can, then feed them syrup made from granulated sugar as soon 
as the harvest commences to close, so as to keep them breeding until 
they are strong in bees. If you attend to them in this way they will 
often be your best colonies in the spring; but if you can not do this 
you had better unite two or more together in the fall; for a weak colony 
in the fall is usually a dead one in the spring. 
Don’t try to winter a queen the third winter. I am sure it doesn’t 
pay. She is almost sure to die, either in the winter or early spring; 
and if she lives she is so slow to start brood in the spring that you 
will have a weak colony until mid-summer; and it will require more 
valuable time to build it up than three queens would cost. 
Don’t fail to keep your bees as warm and comfortable as is pos- 
sible during the first four or five weeks after taking them from their 
winter quarters. We contract the entrances of all colonies to % by 
1 or 2 inches. In doing so it prevents robbing to quite an extent, 
and helps them to enlarge their brood-nest, which is very important 
at this season of the year. We also try to retain all the heat we can 
at the top of the hive. We put a piece of canvas first over the top 
