20 Kansas State Horticultural Society. 



it is easy to overdo it and get a scattered lot of unfinished honey, or crowd 

 them too much and not get the crop one should, and induce swarming. 



The big question is, of course, swarming. I hereby admit that I know little 

 about it. I have read a lot, all that I have found, and do not think that 

 anyone has very much positive knowledge about it or how to prevent or stop 

 it after the bees have the notion of swarming well established. I believe 

 we do know what induces it, but if it is known how to keep a strong colony 

 of bees working in a confined situation such as comb-honey supers, without 

 swarming, I do not know who knows it. Some colonies will do that very 

 thing; some will attempt to swarm at almost the first symptom of crowding. 

 Why one colony should swarm and another not, under the same conditions, 

 is what I do not know. After a colony has shown the intention of swarming, 

 all my own attempts to prevent it have been failures. I have tried all the 

 varieties of shaking I have ever heard of and invented a few of my own. I 

 have shaken them on empty combs, on full combs — that is, combs of honey — 

 on partly filled ones. I have shaken them twice and three times in the same 

 day, and every time I have shaken a colony of bees that are getting ready to 

 swarm, and shaken them with their own queen, I have failed without excep- 

 tion. Some one else may have a different movement than mine, but my own 

 does not do the business. They will not go to work by that manipulation. 



One way I have succeeded in making them work was to take their queen 

 entirely away and leave just one queen cell without brood till the cell hatches, 

 then giving it back to them after the queen has mated. They will then work 

 in a sort of listless way till the young queen hatches, and then they are all 

 right; but I have lost some valuable time, of course. I have also tried the 

 following with success: Take the queen away with one or two frames of 

 brood, shake out all the bees some distance from the hive, and set a weak 

 colony on the stand that has a good queen. I put the old queen with one 

 or two frames of brood on the stand I took the weak colony from. I destroy 

 all queen cells in the old hive and let the bees return to this hive. I have 

 had them go to work almost at once after that manipulation. The new 

 queen seems to put a new sort of aspect on things, and being shaken and 

 disorganized, they have always accepted- the new one and have gone to work. 

 At that time, if I still have more comb-honey supers to fill, and flow con- 

 tinues, I can then go to one of the colonies marked No. 2 and make the same 

 manipulation before described, take their extracting super and put it on one 

 of those not marked, and give them comb-honey supers. They will be 

 by that time in condition to build sections, and just as good as the ones 

 marked No. 1. It will be seen that I do not give any colony comb-honey 

 supers until they have been well started working upstairs and have the storing 

 habit established. I do not have many or a large per cent of colonies attempt 

 to swarm when the plan is followed, but I do have some. In my largest yard 

 last year, one of sixty colonies, I had five colonies try to swarm out of thirty 

 that I had on comb-honey supers. That yard did not have the best flow. 

 The one that had the best flow, a yard of fifty-three colonies, with thirty-five 

 comb-honey colonies, did not have a single one attempt to swarm that I 

 discovered; but of course I might have missed out on one or two. This is my 

 best reason for clipping the queen. 



I make weekly visits during the flow. It is easy to discover a colony that 



