188 
SUMMER. 
ALL BEE-KEEPERS SHOULD UNDERSTAND IT AS IT IS. 
As a guide in many cases, it is important that the 
practical apiarian should understand this matter as it 
is, and not as said to be by many authors. I shall be 
under the necessity of differing from nearly all in 
many points. 
MEANS OF UNDERSTANDING IT. 
This is another case of “ when doctors disagree, 
who shall decide?” You, reader, are just the person. 
There is no need of a doctor at all in this matter. I 
will endeavor to give a test for most of my assertions. 
To make this subject as plain as possible in this place, 
I may repeat some things said before. The facts re- 
lated have come under my own observation. I have 
probably taken more pains than most bee-keepers, to 
understand this matter to the bottom from the beginning, 
(I mean the bottom of the cells). But few apiarians 
have made the number of examinations that I have 
to get at the modus operandi of swarming. Perhaps I 
ought not to expect full credit for veracity, when I 
assure the reader that I have inverted more than one 
hundred stocks to get a peep at the royal cells, some 
of them near a dozen times in one summer. I have 
inverted them frequently for the purpose of obtaining 
cells. But generally to see when such cells are being 
made, when they contain eggs, when these eggs are 
sufficiently matured for swarming, or abandoned and 
destroyed, &c. 
By these signs I predict with certainty (almost) 
