36 FORTY YEARS AMONG THE I'.EES. 



ing- in winter. But I could not then tell, neither can I 

 now tell whether it was because the season was so 

 bad or because the field was overstocked, for I 

 had 363 colonies in four apiaries. Possibly if I had 

 had only half as many bees, the balance might have been 

 on the other side of the ledg-er. But I don't know. 



Somewhere there surely is a limit beyond which one 

 cannot profitably increase the number of colonies in an 

 apiary, but just where that, limit is can perhaps never 

 be learned. If I were oblig^ed to make a .8;'uess, I should 

 say about 80 colonies in one apiary is the limit in my 

 locality. 



If I were to live my life over again, and knew in 

 advance that I should be a bee-keeper, I never would 

 locate in a place with only one source of surplus. \\'hen 

 white clover fails here the bottom drops out. Unfortu- 

 nately the years in which the bottom drops out have been 

 unpleasantly frequent. 



In the fall of 1881 I married Miss Sidney Jane Wilson, 

 who was born on the W'ilson farm where one of mv out- 

 apiaries was and is now located. There was some econ- 

 omy in the arrangement, for she could go to the out- 

 apiary for a day's work, and visit her old home at the 

 same time. 



A GOOD YEAR. 



Of the 177 colonies with which the year 1881 closed, 

 two died in wintering, and I sold one in the spring. 

 That left 174 for the season of 1882, and these gave me 

 16,549 pounds of honey, nearly all in sections. That 

 was 95 pounds per colony, and the increase was only 

 16 per cent. Quite a falling off from the amount per 

 colony of the previous year. But the additional nine 

 thousand pounds in the total crop reconciled me to the 

 "per colony" part of the business. It would be interest- 

 ing to learn how much the difference in the yield per 



