830 WINTERING AND SPRING DWINDLING. 
have an intolerably offensive smell. In excessive confine- 
ment,with a large consumption, from any cause, of more or 
less healthy food, when bees van no longer retain the excre- 
ments in their distended abdomen, they void them upon 
one another, upon the combs, upon the floor, and at the 
entrance of the hive, ‘‘ which bees in a healthy state are 
particularly careful to keep clean.”’ 
If bees can void them, in flight (73), before it is too 
late, they experience no bad effects, hence it is indispensa- 
ble that, when wintered out of doors, bees should be enabled 
to fly, at intervals, during the Winter. 
627. From numerous experiments made, it is evident 
that the purest saccharine matter will feed them with the least 
production of fwces. Hence watery, unripe, or sour honey, 
and all honey containing extraneous matter, are more or 
less injurious to confined bees. Durk honey contai .ing a 
large proportion of mellose is inferior to clover honey or 
sugar-syrup. Honey harvested from flowers, which yield 
much pollen (263), is likely to contain many floating 
grains of it, and will be more injurious than clear, trans- 
parent honey, in cases where bees will be confined to their 
hives by cold for five or six weeks. Honey-dew (255) 
seems worse yet. The juices of fruits, apples, grapes, etc. 
(877), are worst of all. In the Winter of 1880-81, we 
purchased the remains of some 90 colonies, that had been 
winter-killed, and in which the only food left was apple- 
juice, that had been carried in, during the preceding Fall, 
and had turned to cider. This unwholesome food in Winter 
confinement, by causing diarrhea, had killed bees every- 
where around us (784). 
628. Happily these instances, of bees storing apple- 
juice, are scarce, but the practical bee-keeper will not allow 
such food to remain in the hive. It can be extracted (749), 
boiled, and fed back in Spring, for bees do not suffer from 
