120 PROTECTION. 



bottom, and is a triangle whose sides are only one inch long. 

 In the Winter season, this entrance is contracted so that only 

 one bee can pass at a time. Such a hive, with us, as it does 

 not furnish the honey in convenient, beautiful and salable 

 forms, would not meet the demands of our cultivators. Still, 

 there are some very important lessons to be learned from it, 

 by all who keep bees in regions of cold Winters, and hot 

 Summers. It shows the importance which some of the 

 largest Apiarians in the world, attach to protection ; practi- 

 cal, common sense men, whose heads have not been turned, 

 as some would express it, by modern theories and fanciful 

 inventions. They cultivate their bees almost in a state of 

 nature, and their experience on what we would term a 

 gigantic scale, ought to convince even the most incredulous, 

 of the folly of pretending to keep bees, in the miserably thin 

 and unprotected hives to which we have been accustomed. 

 But how, it will be asked, can bees live in Winter, in a 

 hive so closely shut up as the Polish hive .? They do live 

 in such hives, and prosper, just as they do in hollow trees, 

 with only one small entrance. It is well known that bees 

 have flourished when their hives were buried in Winter, and 

 under circumstances in which but a very small amount of air 

 could possibly gain admission to them. Bees, when kept in a 

 dry place, in properly protected hives and in a state of almost 

 perfect repose, need only a small supply of air; and the ob- 

 jection that those cultivators among us, who shut up their 

 colonies very closely in Winter, are almost sure to lose them, 

 is of no weight ; because the majority of our hives are so 

 deficient in protection, that if they are too closely shut up, 

 " the breath of the bees," condensing and freezing upon the 

 inside, and afterwards thawing, causes the combs to mould, 

 and the bees to become diseased ; just as many substances 

 mould and perish when kept in a close, damp cellar. 



