ON FEEDING BEES. 73 



them with sugar. It keeps up the bees, and induces both the 

 queen to keep on breeding and workers to scour the country 

 at e\ ery favourable opportunity in search of honey-dew. 

 Never for a moment harbour the thought that because it 

 is summer your bees require no attention : they need much 

 more care in summer than in winter. It certainly is dis- 

 heartening, and enough to make most persons give up the 

 pursuit in disgust, when they see their stocks dwindling 

 away in summer, when they ought to be paying interest 

 for the capital invested in them the preceding year. The 

 working man or farm labourer in such a case is to be 

 pitied, but my chief object in penning these lines is to 

 persuade him not to give up in despair : a great reward 

 looms in the future ; every summer cannot be bad and un- 

 profitable, and the sun shines all the brighter after the storm. 

 The principal feeding time, however, is in the autumn 

 (September and October). Those stocks which are to 

 be kept on the bench during the wnnter, for next year's 

 harvest, need much attention about this time. Some 

 bee-keepers make it a practice to keep on feeding all the 

 winter ; this is the worst thing that can be done, and 

 nothing that I know tends to weaken the stock so much 

 as this system. All practical apiarians now strongly re- 

 commend all the stock hives to be weighed in the autumn, 

 and those that do not contain at least twenty pounds of 

 food (honey) should be immediately fed up to this point. 

 Then they can settle down for the whole winter, without 

 any other care or looking after, except perhaps to see that 

 they are kept dry. But if the feeding is done by small 

 driblets all the winter it causes robbing and fighting; 

 worst of all, the bees coming out of the warm hives on 

 the floor-board (for when fed in the winter by cottagers it 

 is generally done on a plate, either outside, or just beneath 

 the hive under the combs) are often paralyzed with the 

 cold, and being unable to return to the combs, die. 



