132 miner's AMERICAN 



The bees are hived and they go to work freely. At 

 the end of the season, A finds that he has a fine hive of 

 bees, with a good supply of honey for winter use, and 

 on raising his hive, he finds that it is about three-quarters 

 filled with combs. (If you give a large swarm double 

 the usual room, it is not generally all occupied the first 

 year.) B examines his little family and finds his little 

 hive full of combs, but from the weight of it, he con- 

 cludes that he'll have to feed the bees, in order to carry 

 them through the winter, and he begins to wish that he 

 had not been to the trouble of hiving them at ^^and 

 almost wishes that he had found them all dead ; since 

 the prospect before him, of feeding his little family, so 

 as to enable it to safely pass the winter looks cheerless 

 and forbidding. Well, the v/inter is past, and the genial 

 warmth of the sunny month of May, arouses the bees 

 to great activity. The medium-sized hives are throw- 

 ing ofi" swarms in profusion, and A wonders why hii 

 family in the large hive does not swarm ! " I '11 get a 

 rouser out of that hive when it does come," said A, one 

 day to a neighbor. He might well say, " when it does 

 come ;" for, if he had known anything about the science 

 of bee-management, he might have known that a swarm 

 would never be thrown off" from a hive of such unnatu- 

 ral dimensions. 



A watched in vain for a swarm : — none^came off, and 

 on turning up the hive on the 1 0th of June, lo ! he dis- 

 covered that the bees had not added any new combs 

 to those built the season before, and there was yet a 

 large space of spare room unfilled by them. The 



