258 
UR. miller’s 
the newspaper, or do you use an empty hive-body so the bees will 
go down quickly? 
A. It doesn’t matter whether empty combs are left in the 
upper story or not. The bees will unite just as quickly with or 
without them. Of course, after the bees have had time to unite, 
the two stories are reduced to one, the best combs of»the two 
stories being selected to fill one story. 
Fig. 25. — Two colonics united by the newspaper plan. 
Q. I have just read about your way of uniting two colonies 
by putting paper between them. Did you ever try putting a 
queen-excluding honey-board between them? 
A. Yes, I have united with an excluder between the two colo- 
nies. It is much the same as having nothing between the two 
stories. In some cases — perhaps in most cases — bees will unite 
peaceably when one hive is set directly over the other, with no 
excluder between. In some cases, of course, they would unite all 
right with an excluder. But too often it happens that if one hive 
is set over the other without any precaution, there will be a se- 
vere fight. In that case I doubt if the excluder would do any 
good. But the paper will. There is no possibility, with the paper, 
that one set of bees can fall upon the others cn masse. It will 
take a bit of time for a hole to be made in the paper that shall 
