64 OUT APIARIES 



to crowd the brood chamber for winter and when there is very 

 little chance of inducing swarming by such crowding. 



The number of supers wliich are necessar}- per hive vary with 

 the system adopted by each beekeeper. If he intends to extract 

 during the flow he can get along with less supers. More and 

 more, o utapiar ists are practicing thcplaaiifhaving on hand enoug h 

 drawn supers to hold the crojj of an ord inary Ro-^. Then if 

 the season is bountiful it may be necessary to extract in the mid- 

 dle of the harvest. TheDadant apiaries are run with from three to 

 five, six inch depth, Dadant size supers per colony. This will 

 hold the average crop. Yet in 191() it was necessary' to keep 

 continually extracting to staj^ ahead of the bees. One apiary was 

 extracted four times during the honey flow. 



It is possible to get along with two supers per hive, with care- 

 ful manipulation, but four or even six would be much better. 



Queen Excluders 



Many beekeepers running for extracted honey use queen 

 excluders to keep the queen from laying in the surplus cases. 

 There are two objections to their use. In the first place they 

 hinder to some extent the free passage of the bees into the supers 

 above. In the second place they restrict the queen and are apt 

 to induce swarmir.g. 



In hives with a large lirood chamber the excluder is not so 

 necessary, since the queen has sufficient room below and finds 

 no occasion to go above, and with the use of shallow supers in 

 connection with the large brood chamber, queen excluders become 

 unnecessary except in rare instances. 



To overcome this objection of queen restriction in the smaller 

 hives many beekeepers practice the Demaree plan or a modi- 

 fication thereof. Until the bcginnin.u,- of the surplus flow the 

 queen is allowed the use of two brood chambers for egg laying. 

 Immediately the flow starts, she is put into the lower body with 

 a frame or two of brood, the balance of the l^ody being flUed with 



