The Production of Comb Honey 91 



super and escape by way of the window, which should have wire cloth 



over it on the outside, letting it 



extend several inches above the 



window, and terminate in a small 



cone-like opening from which 



the bees can easily find their wa\ 



out, but not be very likely to 



find their way back. If the 



shaking process is found too laborious, and robbers are not troublesome 



(and they will not be until the close of the season), the super may be 



leaned against the side of the hive, near the entrance, when the bees 



will desert the super for the hive. When robbers are troublesome the 



stragglers may be driven out with smoke and brushed ofif in front of 



the hive. 



By shading the hives, allowing generous entrances, also abundance 

 of room in the supers, swarming is greatly delayed, arid often avoided 

 entirely with many colonies. I have known seasons when, with this 

 management, not more than one-half of my colonies swarmed, and I 

 have frequently had seasons when not more than two-thirds of them 

 swarmed. When a swarm does issue, I hive it in a contracted brood-nest, 

 with starters only in the brood-frames, on the old stand ; put on a 

 queen-excluding honey-board and transfer the supers from the old to 

 the new hive. In twenty minutes, at the outside, the bees are back at 

 work in the sections that they recently deserted in such a hurry. The 

 old colony is placed by the side of the new one for a week, when it is 

 moved to a new stand, thus throwing all of its flying bees into the 

 colony having the sections, and so depleting the old colony, just as the 

 young queens are hatching, that there is seldom any after-swarming. 

 If the swarming takes place early in the season, the old colony may 

 do something in the way of storing surplus ; but, as a rule, it simply 

 becomes a most excellent colony, with a young queen, for carrying 

 through the winter. 



As the harvest draws to a close, an extracting-super is put on top 

 of the sections, as has been already explained, or the unfinished sections 

 may be finished up by feeding back extracted honey, or the sections 

 nearest completion may be sold in the local market, and those not suffi- 

 ciently finished for this purpose may be extracted, and cleaned up by 

 the bees, when they will be ready to use as "baits" to induce the bees to 

 make an early start in the supers the following spring. 



