24 BEEKEEPING IN THE SOUTH 



author's apiaries in the vicinity of Dallas, Texas, and in parts of 

 Florida, where even two ten-frame bodies for winter at times 

 fail to supply sufficient honey. On the Appalachicola river in 

 Florida, for instance, it is often necessary to store honey for 

 brood use the next year. Many southern beekeepers prefer to 

 store away the sealed combs of honey rather than to leave too 

 much honey on the hive. If left where the bees have access to it, 

 they seem to get that "Millions at Our House" feeling described 

 by G. M. Doolittle, and proceed to turn it into brood out of 

 season. This is inadvisable in most parts of Dixie, since the 

 sustaining honey flows often come many weeks after the begin- 

 ning of brood rearing is possible. Consequently the bees might 

 frequently starve if left to their own lesources. 



A Southern Hive. 



There have been numerous attempts to invent a hive which 

 would exactly fulfill southern needs. One might expect to find 

 the long idea hives of Poppleton throughout central Florida 

 where he lived in late years, and the Danzenbaker hive popular 

 throughout the vicinity of Richmond, Virginia, for a similar 

 reason. This is not true. The opinion of good beekeepers, like 

 the choice of the majority in American political life, is one of the 

 safest guides to value. No man has succeeded in making up a 

 strictly "southern" hive. 



The tendency throughout the South, whether the beekeeper 

 runs his bees for comb or extracted honey, has most certainly 

 been toward a deeper hive. With the standard size hive taking 

 Hoffman frames popular throughout Dixie, this deepening has 

 often been accomplished by the addition of another brood cham- 

 ber, or by the use of a shallow extracting brood super above or 

 below the brood chamber. Although this nears the idea intended 

 in the use of the once popular sectional hive in parts of Texas, 

 the author saw but comparatively few of the sectional hives there. 

 The tendency, as elsewhere, was to add another full brood cham- 

 ber. Whether or not a deeper frame, such as used by Dadant, 

 to combine this increased brood room all in one body will be 

 popular in the South or elsewhere, is problematical. It is the 



