42 
BEE-CULTURE. 
trance, and various other contrivances to deceive the moth 
and lead it into a trap. 
As ingenious a contrivance as I have seen is a piece of 
perforated tin to slide down over the entrance at night, and 
still give the bees air. [The moth does all its mischief at 
night.] The hives are all set along in a row, and 3 rod pass- 
ing along the front is attached to all the shutters. This ar- 
rangement is connected by a lever to the hen-roost, so that 
when the fowls go to roost it closes all the hives, and when 
they fly off in the morning it opens them. An objection to 
this arrangement is, that on cloudy evenings they go to roost 
too soon and shut out many of the bees. At other times a 
lazy old hen would keep them in entirely too late 
PRUNING COMBS. 
Is pruning ever necessary ? If so, how often ? 
There is a common impression that bees somehow dislike 
old dark combs, that worms will breed more in them, and that 
bees cannot prosper long in such; hence the practice of break- 
ing out the combs frequently to have them replaced with new 
ones. I have never yet seen anything to lead me to believe 
that bees have any preference for new white combs over old 
dark ones. However we may fancy the appearance of white 
combs, and prefer to have our table honey stored in such, there 
seems to be no reason for believing that one is not as good for 
the bees as the other. 
_ The only way in which it would seem they could be inju- 
riously affected by old combs, is by the cells becoming so 
small as to breed small bees. As every young bee that hatches 
leaves a sheath or cocoon inside of its cell, if ten young bees 
are hatched from each cell every season for ten years it will 
contain one hundred cocoons, which one would naturally sup- 
pose would make it very small. 
It is true they do become some smaller ; yet I am not able 
to say that bees are more prosperous in new than in old combs. 
I haveseen boesthat were very prosperous in combs that were 
thirty years old. It would take close observation to distinguish 
between the bees of such a hive and those of one containing 
new combs. However, it may be best to break out the part 
of the combs that are devoted to rearing brood most every 
ten or twelve years. 
