JUNCTION OF SECOND SWARMS. 213 



augmented, and at the close of the season, they will be found 

 to have amassed twenty to twenty-five pounds of honey. 

 The bee-master will in general find it to be his interest to 

 return his second swarms to the parent hives, rather than 

 expose them to starvation during the winter, and himself to 

 the endless trouble and expense of feeding them. Some apia- 

 rians indeed recommend that the second swarms should not 

 be joined to a populous hive until the close of the season ; and 

 this practice is grounded on the principle, that the propri- 

 etor, by joining the second swarm to a populous hive becomes 

 possessed of all the honey, which it may have made during 

 the season ; at the same time, that he has enriched his already 

 populous hive by afewhundreds of consuming mouths, when, 

 in reality, they were neither wanted nor desired. Another 

 very valid objection exists to this practice, which is, that it 

 is a very easy matter to speak of the junction of two com- 

 munities of bees, but the execution of the act is a very differ- 

 ent thing indeed; the greater part of the difficulty is however 

 obviated, if the bees of the second swarm be returned imme- 

 diately to the parent hive, for as they have not yet lost 

 the peculiar odour of the hive in which they were bred, they 

 consequently will be received without any quarrelling or 

 fighting. If, however, the junction be not effected until the 

 close of the season, the mere circumstance of the weaker 

 hive having been originally a second swarm of the stronger 

 one, has no effect on the disposition of the bees towards 

 each other; as all remembrance of each other is obliterated, 

 and as they then appear to each other in the character of entire 

 strangers, all the difficulties of the process of junction are 

 to be encountered, with perhaps the loss of both the hives, 

 merely for the sake of three or four pounds of honey. 



We have great and good reason to eulogize Bonner for 

 his skill in many of the practical departments of the apiary, 

 but in the junction of two swarms he was greatly defec- 

 tive. His method consisted of reverting one of the hives 

 and placing the other over it, and having wound a sheet or 



