PREVENTION OF NATURAL SWARMING. 241 



these appliances will do only in small apiaries, where bee- 

 keepers can examine each colony daily; and even there, we 

 would not advise their constant use. 



Mr. Langstroth had formerly de- 

 vised a non-swarmer block, with a 

 metallic slide, to prevent the es- 

 cape of the queen. This was aban- ^'S- 98. 

 doned, because it annoyed the non-swaemee block. 

 bees and interfered with ventila- the^hlve'in Fig.^6i°° 

 tion, as all such arrangements do. 



It would be a useful implement to reduce the entrance in 

 winter. 



Mr. C. C. Miller succeeds in producing large crops, and 

 almost entirely preventing the issue of swarms, but the manip- 

 ulations to which he resorts are so frequent as to make the 

 practice unadvisable for the average bee-keeper. The spe- 

 cialist who wishes to raise comb honey and avoid swarming 

 had best secure the book "Forty Years Among the Bees" and 

 study it carefully. 



468. After-swarms have been prevented from issuing, by 

 a method invented by Jas. Heddon. The Heddon method 

 consists in placing the first swarm side by side with the parent 

 hive, and one week after the issue of the swarm, or just pre- 

 vious to the expected- departure of the second swarm, remov- 

 ing the parent hive to a new location, thus giving all its old 

 bees to the first swarm. This is virtually preventing a nat- 

 ural issue by a forced issue, but making the first swarm 

 strong, at the expense of the mother colony. The sole objec- 

 tion to this method is that it does away only with the annoy- 

 ance of catching the swaim, and leaves the parent colony 

 much weakened. 



468 bis. Some Apiarists who raise comb honey with small 

 hives, such as the eight-frame Langstroth or dovetailed hive, 

 have adopted a method similar to the one just mentioned and 

 much more satisfactory. The new swarm, when hived, is put 

 on the stand of the old colony and this one is removed to a 



