244 AUSTRALASIAN 
Cisse, ILE 
‘ 
WINTERING.— UNITING. 
A STRIKING feature in the practical working of apiaries in the 
Australasian colonies (and indeed in all the habitable regions 
of the Southern Hemisphere, with the exception, perhaps, of the 
most southern extremity of South America), is the facility for 
carrying the stocks safely through the winter, as compared with 
the difficulties experienced in that respect in the most important 
bee-keeping districts in the Northern Hemisphere. 
DIFFERENCE IN CHARACTER OF WINTER SEASONS. 
In no part of New Zealand or Australia is there a lower mean 
winter temperature than 40° Fahr., which is as mild as that of 
Northern Italy, and in the greater portion of the Northern 
Island of New Zealand, in New South Wales, Victoria, and 
South Australia, it is up to or above 50°, with a perfect freedom, 
in the level country, from anything deserving the name of heavy 
frost or falls of snow. There are certainly many countries in 
the northern part of the world similarly circumstanced, some of 
which, like the countries of the Mediterranean, have been the 
earliest seats of bee-culture, and others, like the Southern and 
Western States of the American Union, are now amongst the 
most advanced in that industry; but in consequence of scientific 
apiculture having grown up in Germany, England, and the 
Northern States of America, all of which countries have to 
contend with severe and protracted winter seasons, it happens 
that all the works which have been published on the snbject of 
bee-culture naturally dwell much upon the difficulties to be 
contended with in wintering bees, and the modes of overcoming 
those difficulties ; and nearly all those works treat the subject 
as if it were a difficulty inherent in the practice of bee-keeping 
and not merely dependent upon peculiarities of climate. At 
