FIFTY YEARS AMONG THE BEES 131 



pings of the sections wMte. At one time I had wide frames of 

 sections facing brood-frames (the brood-frames were used to 

 bait the bees up into the supers), and if the brood-frames were 

 left there till the sections were sealed, the sealing would be 

 almost if not quite as dark as the sealing of brood-combs. The 

 bees seem to carry bits of the old, black brood-combs to use in 

 capping the sections. So the thick top-bar increasing the dis- 

 tance of the sections from the brood-combs helps to keep the 

 former whiter. 



NO EXCLUDER UNDER SECTIONS. 



" Before putting on the super, would you advise me to put 

 a queen-excluder (Fig. 56) over the brood-chamber?" It would 

 increase the space between the brood-combs and the sections, 

 and in that way would be a further help toward prevention of 

 dark cappihgs on the sections, and it would make a sure thing 

 as to preventing burr-eombs on the bottoms of the sections. 

 But I don't believe there would be enough advantage in both 

 ways to pay for the excluders. 



I think I hear you say, " But wouldn't it pay to use exclud- 

 ers for the sake of keeping tlie queen out of the supers? " I 

 may reply that the queen so seldom goes up into a super that 

 not one section in a hundred, sometimes not more than one in a 

 thousand, will be found troubled with brood. So on the whole 

 I hardly think that all the advantages to be gained from using 

 excluders would pay for the time and trouble of using them. 

 I need not consider so very much the cost of them, for I have a 

 lot on hand lying idle. At one time I thought I had a plan for 

 prevention of swarming by the use of excluders, and was so 

 sanguine about it that I got 150 of them. I think a great deal 

 of queen-excluders, and wouldn't like to do without them, but 

 I did not need 150 of them, for my excluder-swarm-prevention 

 plan did not turn out to be a howling success. 



EXPERIMENTING ON TOO LARGE A SCALE. 



Allow me to digress long enough to confess that one of my 

 weaknesses is being a little too sanguine about new plans while 

 they are yet in the raw, and so experimenting on too large a 

 scale. More than one crop of honey has been lessened by means 



