78 FORTY YEARS AMONG THE BEES. 



ciently may lead them to do violence to the queen. So, 

 when I find the c|ueen thus balled, I always close the 

 hive immediatel)', not g^enerally touching it ag'ain till 

 the next day, when everythin.a;' will be found all rig'ht. 



MAKING RECORD. 



After the overhauling of a colony is completed, a 

 record thereof must be made. If May lo, 1902, should 

 be the date of the visit, and if 1 should clip the queen at 

 that visit, I would make the entry, "May 10 cl q (01)," 

 which means that I clipped the queen Ma}- 10, and that 

 she was a queen reared in 1901. If, later in the season, 

 I should clip a queen reared that same season, the entry 

 would be, "cl q (02)," meaning that the queen was reared 

 in 1902. In either case the year of the birth of the old queen 

 in the left-hand margin has a line drawn through it, and 

 the birth-year of the new queen is written under it. If 

 I find a clipped queen in the hive, then the entry is, "q 

 cl," which means the queen was already clipped. It 

 might not seem important to enter that the queen was al- 

 ready clipped, but if I do not find her the first or second 

 time looking over the combs I leave it till another day, 

 leaving a blank after the date, and that keeps me in mind 

 of the fact that I have not yet seen the queen. 



After clipping the wing of the queen I put her on 

 the top of a frame directly over the brood-nest. If you 

 hold her on your finger over the brood-nest she displays 

 a great degree of perverseness and persists in crawling 

 uo your hand, right away from her proper home. So I 

 let her crawl upon a leaf, little stick or other object, lay 

 this on the frames, and she will directly go down into the 

 cluster. 



On this first visit I also generally enter in the rec- 

 ord-book the amount of brood present. If the record is 

 "2 br," or "3 br," it means that two combs or three combs 

 are fairly well filled with brood^at least half filled with 



