216 
TI1E HIVE AND HONEY-BEE. 
mize room, and to give easier access to his setting hens, he 
had partitioned a long box into a dozen or more separate 
apartments. The hens, in returning to their nests, were 
deceived by the similarity of the entrances, so that often 
one box contained two or three unamiable aspirants for 
the honors of maternity, while others were entirely for¬ 
saken. Many eggs were broken, more were addled, and 
hardly enough hatched to establish one mother as the 
happy mistress of a flourishing family. Had he left his 
hens to their own instincts, they would have scattered 
their nests, and gladdened his eyes with a numerous off¬ 
spring. 
Through the length and breadth of our land, bee¬ 
keepers who suffer heavy losses, from the proximity and 
similarity of their hives, unsuspicious of the true cause of 
their misfortunes, impute them to the bee-moth, or some 
of the many enemies of the bee. Judge Fishback, of 
Batavia, Ohio, informed me, in the Fall of 1854, while on 
a visit to his large Apiary, that he had for many years 
guarded against the loss of young queens, by painting the 
fronts of his hives of different colors, and making their 
entrances face in various ways.* Every bee-keeper, 
whose hives are so arranged that the young queens are 
liable to make mistakes, must count upon heavy losses. 
If he puts a number of hives, under circumstances similar 
to those described, upon a bench, or the shelves of a bee- 
house, he can never keep their number good without con¬ 
stant renewal. The first swarms, and those stocks which 
do not swarm, as they retain their fertile queens, will do 
well enough; but many of those that swarm will be robbed 
* John Mills, in a work published at London, In 1766, gives (p. 98) the following 
directions‘‘Forget not to paint the mouths of your colonies with different colors, 
<u> led, white, blue, yellow, &c., in form of a half-moon, or square, that the bees 
may the better know their own home.” Such precautions preserved the stocks 
from becoming queenless, although they were not adopted for that end. 
