HOW TO KEEP BEES. 29 



run in among them. The procedure is this: See that the hive is 

 smoke tight. If the cover does not fit snugly, remove it, lay two 

 or three thickness of cloth or bagging over the top of the hive and 

 replace the cover. If there are cracks at the corners of the hive, 

 plug them with rags. Then nearly close the entrance of the hive 

 with any convenient thing as grass, weeds or cloth, etc. Have the 

 smoker going well, puff it until it sends out a cloud of thick white 

 smoke, blow three or four puffs well inside of the entrance and com- 

 pletely close it. If the space below the frames is less than an inch 

 it is often well to blow three or four puffs under the cover (under the 

 bagging, if one has put that on), and then blow in at the entrance. 

 In a few moments the bees will begin to " roar." At once let the 

 queen run in at the entrance and reclose it, or open the end of the 

 cage opposite to the food and lay the cage on top of the frames 

 and shut all tight. The queen is immediately one of the mass of 

 distressed bees each turning to the other for "help" and when 

 the disturbance subsides she is quite as much at home as they are. In 

 ten minutes after the queen is run in, about an inch of the entrance 

 is opened, and the bees allowed to ventilate and quiet down. At 

 the bee-keeper's convenience, after the bees are quiet, the rest of the 

 entrance can be opened. 



Some persons have failed with this method when the colony oc- 

 cupied two or more hive bodies, or when several supers were on 

 owing to the difficulty of filling the hive with smoke. When a 

 colony is as populous as that or as busy as that it is a very poor time 

 to swap queens. Conditions, however, may be such that it becomes 

 necessary to put in a queen at such a time, if so, lift off upper story 

 or supers lay a sheet of newspaper on top of the lower brood cham- 

 ber, replace the- upper story or supers and at once proceed to introduce 

 the queen into the lower chamber. The bees will remove the paper 

 in short order. 



A colony infested with laying workers will accept a queen run in 

 this way when they will not in any other, but unless they have been 

 given a frame of unsealed brood shortly before or soon after the 



