1 Fes., 1902.] QUEENSLAND AGRICULTURAL JOURNAL. 111 
Apiculture. 
SOME APIARY DO’S AND DONT’S. 
By H. R. STEPHENS, Toowoomba Apiaries. 
1. Don’t feed bees near hives. You may start robbing. 
2. Don’t leave the honey house door open, and keep the combs covered. 
3. Do not let the bees go without worker eggs when their queen is 
lost. 
4, Don’t nurse weak colonies. It is better to unite and have one strong 
one. 
5. Do not go in for elaborate hives if you are keeping bees for business. 
As in other things, simplicity is best. 
6. Don’t bustle your bees. Work quietly. Let them do the bustling 
for the honey. 
7. Keep a record of the state of your hives, and date when looked at 
last. 
§. Fix foundation firmly in frames before giving to bees, especially to the 
top bar. . 
9. Don’t allow too many swarms to come from a hive; the first is usually 
best and most easily controlled. 
BUSY BEES—TRANSFERRING. 
Tn almost every apiary there is a little transferring to be done each year, 
either from box hives or odd-sized frame hives. 
There are almost as many ways of transferting as there are beekeepers 
using them; the most of them are faulty, causing the beekeeper to get his 
clothes all daubed with honey and his temper far from “ sweet.” 
The Heddon method is the most generally used, but I do not like it, as 
there is too much tinkering about it. The writer hit on the following plan 
some years ago, and I have used it ever since. I think I was the first to make 
it public, which I did in the “ Australian Bee Bulletin” of September 23, 1894, 
page 137. The following description of the method is re-written from that 
journal :— j 
To transfer from a box hive to a bar frame hive I proceed as follows :— 
Remove the box hive from its stand, first blowing a little smoke in at the 
entrance. Invert the hive and remove the bottom; place a box on the inverted 
hive and drum nearly all the bees into it. Now place the hive that we wish to 
transfer our bees into on the old stand, being sure to have the entrance in 
exactly the same place that the old one was in; hang four or five combs in 
the new hive. It is all the better if one or two contain brood of all ages 
and some honey. 
Put on the cover, and spread a sheetin front of the new hive, lean a board 
from the sheet to the entrance; now lift off the box into which the bees were 
driven (if you have made a good drive there should be very few bees left in the 
old hive), set the box on the sheet, and throw a bag or sheet over the old hive, 
so that the bees cannot see it. Now throw the bees out of the box upon the 
sheet, letting them fall a few inches from the board leading to the entrance to 
the new hive; we want them far enough away so as to give us a chance to see 
the queen as they crawl into the hive. If they are black, you want to watch 
