ADVANCED BEE-CULTURE, 



77 



tempt to winter them upon this honey by 

 any method. But bee-keepers can do 

 this: Notice if any particular kind of 

 honey is more likely to give trouble, and 

 then avoid its use as winter stores. Part 



s ummer stands, and part put into the 

 cellar. In a warm open winter, the bees 

 out-of-doors will stand the better chance; 

 in a severe winter the odds will be in 

 favor of the cellar — and their owner must 



of the bees may be protected on their take his chances. 



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Out-Door Wintering. 



F BEES can enjoy frequent flights, 

 out of doors is the p lace to winter 

 them. If deprived of these flights, 

 '-^ a temperature of about 45° enables 

 them to bear a much longer confinement 

 than does a temperature below freezing. 

 In the South, frequent flights are assured; 

 in the North, no dependence can be plac- 

 ed upon the matter. Some winters are 

 "open," or there are January thaws, al- 

 lowing the bees to eniov cleansing flights, 

 while other winters hold them close 

 prisoners for four or five months. It is 

 this element of uncertainty attending the 

 wintering of bees in the open air that has 

 driven so many bee-keepers to the adop- 

 tion of cellar wintering. Still, there are 

 some bee-keepers who, from some pecul- 

 iarity of location , winter their bees in the 

 open air with quite uniform success; 

 others are compelled, for the present, at 

 least, to winter the bees out of doors; in 

 short, a large portion of the bees, even 

 in the North, are wintered in the open 

 air, and probably will be for a long time 

 to come, and while my preference is the 

 cellar, I have no desire to ignore the out- 

 door method. 



It does not seem as though the ques- 

 tion of whether bees should be protected, 

 in the North, need receive any consider- 

 ation whatever, yet it has been objected 

 to on the grounds that the packing be- 

 comes damp, that it deprives the bees of 

 the warmth of the sun and that they 



sometimes fail to fly in the winter (be- 

 cause the outside warmth is so slow in 

 reaching them) when bees in single-wall 

 hives may be in full flight. There is oc- 

 casionally a still, mild day in winter up- 

 on which the sun shines out bright and 

 strong for an hour or two, and bees in 

 single-wall hives enjoy a real cleansing 

 flight, while the momentary rise in the 

 temperature passes away ere it has pene- 

 trated the thick walls of a chaff hive. 

 On the other hand, there are days and 

 weeks and sometimes months unbroken 

 by these rises in temperature; and the 

 bees must depend for their existence up- 

 on the heat generated by themselves, 

 and the more perfect the non-conductor 

 by which they are surrounded, the less 

 will be the loss of heat. When bees are 

 well protected, there is less necessity for 

 flight than when the protection is slight. 

 If the bee-keeper thinks, however, that 

 bees in chaff hives ought to fly on a warm 

 day, but they don't fly, he has only to re- 

 move the covering over the bees and al- 

 low them to fly from the tops of the hives. 

 For several winters I left quite a number 

 of colonies unprotected. I discontinued 

 the practice only when thoroughly con- 

 vinced that, in this locality, the losses 

 were lessened by protection. In mild 

 winters the bees came through in pretty 

 fine condition. In severe winters the 

 bees in the outside spaces, or ranges of 

 combs, died first; the cluster became 



