326 WINTERING AND SPRING DWINDLING. 



CHAPTER XIII 



Wintering and Spring Dwindling. 

 Wintering. 



619. Bees can be wintered safely in nearly. all climates, 

 where the Summer is long enough to enable them to store a 

 Winter supply. In the natural state, the vital heat of the 

 live hollow trees in which they dwell, helps to maintain a 

 higher temperature than that of the outside air, and bees 

 Winter so well in such abodes, that travelers, who visit 

 Northern Russia, wonder how so small an insect can live in 

 such inhospitable countries. 



620. As s on as fros'y weather arrives, bees cluster com- 

 pactly together in their hives, to kee ) warm. They do not 

 assemble on combs full of honey, but on t!]e empty comb 

 just below the honey. They are never dormant, lilse wasps 

 and hornets, and a t'lermometer pus led up among them 

 will show a Summer temperature, even when, in the open air, 

 it is many degrees below zero. 



The bees in the cluster are imbricated, like the shingles of 

 a roof, each bee having her head under the abdomen of the 

 one above her, and so on, to the ones who are in reach of 

 the honey. These pass the honey to those below them, 

 which pass it to the next, and so on, to the bottom of the 

 mass. 



621. When the cold becomes intense, they keep up an 

 incessant tremulous motion, in order to develop more heat* 



• ETeiyfeody knows that motion transforms Itself into heat, and that heat is 

 hut a form of motion . whether the motion comes from a large body 



or £pom a small one, whether this motion be suddenly or gradually stopped, 

 the result is the same, it is transformed into heat. — (Flaminarion, "Le Mon4e 

 ATant la CrSation de 1 ' Homme. ") 



