EXTRACTING 
323 
When so many combs are being shaken 
and brushed, the trouser leg's should be 
tied around the ankles, or should be stuffed 
inside the stockings, since it is the nature 
of bees to crawl upward. The most con- 
A goood way to brush bees from a comb. Both 
sides may be brushed without changing the position 
of the comb very much. 
venient arrangement is a pair of bicycle 
pants-guards. Many beekeepers take the 
additional precaution of wearing fingerless 
gauntlet gloves in order to prevent the 
bees from crawling up the sleeves. 
THE USE OF BEE-ESCAPES. 
Of course by far the easiest and nicest 
way to free supers from bees is to use the 
Porter bee-escape, the use of which is ex¬ 
plained under Comb Honey. The escape- 
boards, if placed under the supers in the 
afternoon, will almost entirely free the 
combs of bees the following day. Son\p- 
times more time is required, but usually 
this is enough. The honey is then removed 
without knowledge of the bees; there is no 
danger of robbing, no stings, no loss of 
time, and no disturbance. There is not 
even any need of using a smoker. It the 
colony has two supers, and the upper one 
only is ready to come off, the escape should, 
of course, be put between the upper and 
lower super, so that the bees will not be 
prevented from working in the super not 
yet finished. 
In the production of comb honey the 
use of the bee-escape for removing bees 
from the super is almost universal, and is 
rapidly becoming so in the case of extract¬ 
ed honey also. Formerly there were two 
objections to the escape. It was found 
that in the 24 or 48 hours required for the 
bees to pass down into the brood-chamber, 
the honey became cold, and therefore much 
harder to extract. The second objection 
was that the bees did not leave the extract- 
ing-combs quite as readily as they did the 
comb-honey sections on account of the fact, 
probably, that there are always some un¬ 
capped cells, and the bees are slow in leav¬ 
ing thru the escape on this account. 
Hodgson ventilated bee-escape board. 
The first objection has been largely over¬ 
come by the ventilated or screened escape- 
board. As the name implies, the bee- 
escape, instead of being placed in the cen¬ 
ter of a solid board, is put in the center of 
a screen, bound with a wooden frame. The 
warmth of the bees below rises and keeps 
the honey warm—almost as warm as tho 
the bees were on it, so that it extracts eas¬ 
ily- 
The second objection has been overcome 
by the use of the double bee-escape. If the 
combs are entirely capped over, the super 
may be taken off in the morning if the 
escapes are put on the day before. 
The ventilated escape-board, which is the 
invention of Arthur Hodgson of Jarvis, 
Ontario, has brought the escape into gen- 
