12 Kansas State Horticultural Society. 



material. A hive may be placed singly in a packing box, or they may be put 

 in groups of four, with two of the entrances facing to the east and two to the 

 west. Four inches of packing should be placed beneath the hives, six inches 

 on the sides, and eight inches on the top. Tunnels should be made to the 

 exterior so that the bees can pass out for flight. Packing should be put on 

 after the first frost, and a good insulating material will be ground cork, leaves, 

 chaff, shavings or sawdust, packed tightly around the hives. Another method 

 of packing is to place poultry netting with two-inch mesh around the hive, 

 allowing it to protrude about six inches all the way round, and pack between 

 this and the hives with leaves. More leaves should be stuffed beneath the 

 hive, and a super filled with leaves placed on top. Th's last form of packing 

 gives good winter protection, is easy to prepare, and costs but little. 



Plenty of room for spring brood rearing may be given by using a two- 

 story hive for wintering purposes, as the queen will then have much more 

 room than if confined to a single story. However, two-story hives are not 

 always satisfactory, and it really would be better to winter bees in one of the 

 larger hives, such as the Dadant hive or the Jumbo hive, because instead of 

 having a break between the upper and lower hive bodies there would be one 

 continuous sheet of comb between the bottom bar and the top bar, which 

 would give more ideal conditions for brood rearing than if the queen were 

 obliged to pass over the obstructions which would be found in going from one 

 hive to the other. She would pass up from the lower hive body to the upper 

 much quicker than she would go back down. The obstructions in the way of 

 her passing would act as a natural queen excluder. 



To sum up, a young queen should be introduced in August to insure plenty 

 of young bees, then winter packing should be applied immediately after the 

 first killing frost, and if the hives are so placed that they are protected from 

 the wind, with plenty of stores and plenty of room for spring brood rearing, 

 there is no reason why large colonies of bees should not result from this 

 practice. In order to get more honey from a colony we must have more bees 

 in it, and every effort of the beekeeper which produces more bees at the 

 right time means more money in his pocket. 



THE IMPORTANCE OF WINTER STORES. 



The Kansas State Agricultural College is conducting at the Experiment 

 Station a test to determine the best form of a winter protection for bees. 



The value of a windbreak, the superiority of a two-story over a one-story 

 liive for wintering and the value of packing are clearly shown. During the 

 winter of 1919-'20 this experiment was continued, and when on the 19th of 

 May the bees were weighed to determine which form of wintering had been 

 best for them, some additional factors were found to have entered •into the 

 experiment that were not present in the first two years' work. These 

 bees -were placed in winter quarters on October 4, 1919, with a known 

 amount of honey and a known number of bees in each hive. Sufficient stores 

 were left in each colony to feed them through any ordinary winter and to the 

 beginning of the nectar flow. On the 5th of April the temperature at Man- 

 hattan dropped to five degrees above zero. This low temperature was accom- 

 panied by a heavy snowstorm. As a consequence of this unseasonable weather 

 the. flowers on which the bees would ordinarily depend for spring food were 



