IT. 
INTRODUCTION. 
of large profits in good ones. Some men have made a great 
deal of money from bees. Why cannot any one? Three- 
fourths of the bees that perish might be saved with proper 
care. If two-thirds of the bees that swarm were kept alive, 
there would be fifty thousand in this (Harrison) county, in a 
very few years. There arc probably four thousand in it now. 
There is but little danger of overstocking the country. 
Most authors agree on this. In European countries to have 
one and two thousand hives in one apiary is common. The 
six hundred within two miles of this place seem to do equally 
as well as where there are only a dozen in one place. At 
any rate there will be no danger from starvation where there 
are not more than two or three hundred kept. But inde- 
pendent of profits, it will pay all lovers of nature to keep 
them for the pleasure of watching and studying them. 
They add materially to the attractions of a home. 
It has been suggested that our stock of bees has become 
enfeebled in constitution, and inclined to run out. The in- 
troduction of Italian Bees and crossing the breed seems to 
remedy that evil. Doubtless very many of the processes and 
manipulations recommended, will be objected to by many on 
the ground that they are not natural ; that every dis- 
turbance of them, or change of their natural course is neces- 
sarily injurious. This seems rather plausible. But on re- 
flection we find that it is only by modifying, changing and 
controlling the course of the nature of things that we are en- 
abled to appropriate the advantages of them. It must be 
done judieioujly. This is the only limit. Hiving a swarm 
of bees, taking a box of honey, robbing a hen’s nest, killing 
a calf, and appropriating its food, and all the processes by 
which we derive benefit from our domestic animals, are arti- 
ficial. As the larger portion of bee-keepers yet use the 
common open bottom bee-bivc, when I speak of any opera- 
tion with the hive, reference is always had to this kind of 
hive, except where other kinds are expressly named. 
