MANAGEMENT OF OUT-APIARIES 6;i 



road toward success within one hour after the bees are shaken from their 

 brood. Here is one of the great advantages of this plan, and one of the 

 thing's ori,gnml with. it. And I did not realize till one year later, 1906, that, 

 if the bees contracted the swainiins' fever before they were shaken suf- 

 lieiently to cause the queen to slacken her laying-, that it, in a measure, de- 

 tracted from the plan by her not filling eveiy empty cell with eggs as fast 

 as the bees removed the honey from them to the sections; for till sickness 

 prevented me from doing the "shook swarming" in time I had had no such 

 slackening-, as no colonies had advanced far enough for the queen to stop 

 laying in preparation for hersPying with the swarm. Therefore, I consider 

 all of the advice g-iven in the past, "to wait about shaking till preparations 

 for swarming- are made," as decidedly wrong. But the upper hive of combs 

 keeps the d^ire to swarm down till it is time to shake for the clover har- 

 vest, so there is no need of a failure here if we do our "shook Swarming" 

 when it ought to be done. 



Another thing, which I see I failed to mention in any of the accounts 

 given of the different -visits, which I consider a ^eat help in any apiary, 

 is shade-boards. I am convinced that a colony of bees will do much better 

 work where the hivie stands right out in the sun during the whole season, 

 except as it is shielded during the middle of the day by a shade-board. 



A DOOLITTLE SHADE BOARD 



I make this board of half-inch lumber, 20 inches long, nailed to two strips 

 % thick by II/2 wide by 28 inches long,' covering the whole with a sheet 

 of 20x28 tin. Roofing-paper will answer nearly as well as the tin, if 

 kept painted. ' Near one end of the shade-board, and before putting on 

 the tin, I nail, on the under side, a piece of % stuff 6 inches wide by 

 20 long, nailing down through the board into the- edge of this twenty-inch 

 piece. When the board is on the hive, this last-named piece rests, by its 

 lower edge, on the back part to the cover to the hive, while the cleats 

 rest on the front part of the coyer. This gives this shade-board a "pitch'" 

 toward the front, or south side of the hive, so it will cairy off all rain, 

 shade the hive mostly from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. each day, and allows the air 

 to circulate freely all over and about the top of the hive, so that the 

 bees are never driven out of the sections through extreme heat, as is 

 often the case where hives stand in the sun without any shade, even though 

 the cover is painted white. It matters little what color these shade-boards 

 are painted, on account of the circulation of air under them; still, where 

 I paint hives at all I prefer the color to be white. 



I feel that I ought not to close this work without saying a few words 

 regarding the automobile for the apiarist, inasmuch as I have mentioned 

 it several times when telling of my visits to the out-apiary. At times 

 J think the one I have (an eight-horse-power single-cylinder Pierce Stan- 

 hope, and I think it as good as any, or I would not have purchased it), 



