A Book of Bees
Beekeeping is a business that requires the greatest amount of attention to small details.… The good beekeeper is generally more or less cranky.
—C. P. DADANT
FOR THE SWEET BEE,
Apis mellifera
I
THE BEEKEEPER’S AUTUMN
The Beekeeper’s Autumn
For a long, long time—for nearly forty years—I never had any bees. I can’t think why. Everyone should have two or three hives of bees. Bees are easier to keep than a dog or a cat. They are more interesting than gerbils. They can be kept anywhere. A well-known New York City publisher keeps bees on the terrace of his Upper East Side penthouse, where they happily work the flowers in Central Park.
I have had bees now for fifteen years, and my life is the better for it. I operate a beekeeping and honey-producing farm in the Ozark Mountains of southern Missouri. I keep three hundred hives of bees, separated into groups of ten or twelve, in what are called outyards—land that I rent from other fanners at the cost of a gallon of honey a year, rent I pay to the farmers for the privilege of putting the bees there. The farmers and their families like the honey, but they like having the bees on their land even better. The clover in their pastures is more luxuriant because the bees are there to pollinate it, and the vegetables in their gardens and the fruit on their trees benefit from the bees, too. My best and most productive beeyards, however, are those near towns, because townspeople plant flowers and water both their flowers and clover-scattered lawns, providing the bees with a constant supply of fresh blossoms to secrete nectar which they turn into honey.
Every once in a while I read in the beekeeping magazines about someone who has had complaints about his bees. I am always astonished, because around here everyone has a fine friendly feeling toward them. My own beekeeping operation is a matter of minor local pride, and is the focus of interest and curiosity. People come out to my farm and ask if they may tour the “honey factory.” I am asked to speak to local civic groups and high school biology classes. The bees themselves are regarded with a certain amount of affection and good humor.
The town in which I live is very small. All the other farmers raise pigs and cattle, and making a living from bees does give them something to talk about down at the café other than fescue foot and the price of pork bellies. Cows and pigs are large animals, and the farmers keep track of them by putting a numbered ear tag on each beast’s ear. It tickles their fancies that someone can make a living with a bunch of wild bugs who can’t be penned and marked, but who fly everywhere, unruly but helpful, pollinating plants and making honey. They enjoy telling jokes on me, I know.
Nelson is the town wit. Like any Ozark storyteller, he piles outrage on top of outrage without even the smallest trace of a smile. It was Nelson who, straightfaced, spread it around town that when a swarm of bees gathered on my mailbox and stayed there for several days, it was because I hadn’t put enough postage stamps under their wings. Nelson said it was a well-known fact that with proper postage a bee could travel anywhere in the continental U.S. of A. “’Course if they was to go abroad, the rate is a mite higher. Maybe they was. Seems like a smart lady like Sue ought to know how much postage to put on a bee.”
I was sitting in the café one day with Nelson and some of the other good old boys, when Nelson, deadpan, said, “Say, one of your bees was over a-bothering my peach tree this morning.”
“How’d you know she was mine, Nelson?” I asked, looking him straight in the eye. I was determined to put up a fight this time.
Nelson hadn’t expected my question.
“Why, they’re all yours, aren’t they? I thought you owned every blessed bee around here, the way you’re always talking ’em up at the Chamber of Commerce meetings.”
“No, that isn’t true. There are wild ones in trees all over, and then Henry has some, and so does Billy, right here in town. I’ll tell you what you’ve got to do before you carry on so about my bees bothering your peach tree. What you’ve got to do, Nelson, is go over to that tree and check the ear tag on the bee. The first thing I do after a new bee is born is to put an ear tag on her ear. You check the tag and you tell me her number, and then I’ll let you know if I’m going to accept responsibility for that bee.”
Nelson threw back his head and laughed.
A report of our exchange went around the café. This was several years ago, but even now every once in a while someone will stop me in town and say, “Hey, Bee Lady, I saw Number three fifty-seven on a clover blossom in my lawn today.”
“That so? How’s she looking?”
“Jest fine. Better in fact than the last time I saw her, when I thought she looked a mite peaked.”
“Good to hear she’s improved.”
The end of one honey season is the start of the next, and autumn is a good time to begin with bees. It is when many people buy a few hives from an established beekeeper and move them from his place to theirs, because at that time a beekeeper is often willing to sell some of his hives at a lower price than he would in springtime. He has already taken his honey crop, and there is always a certain amount of risk in carrying a hive through the winter, a risk that is transferred to the buyer.
Summer’s end is also the beginning of a new cycle for bees. It is then that they prepare for the winter ahead, and their preparations, along with the help a beekeeper can give them, determine how good the next season will be.
In any part of the country where there are flower-killing frosts, bees need to store up honey for the cold months during which they will no longer be able to forage for fresh nectar. Here in the Ozarks, where winters are severe but interspersed with mild days when the bees can be active, they need about seventy-five or eighty pounds of stored honey to see them through.
In some places, bees make their winter stores principally from late-blooming goldenrod, but the Ozark bees generally scorn these flowers, preferring the Aster ericoides—the snow aster or Michaelmas daisy, a plant that grows widely throughout the United States. Asters, in general, are much beloved by bees; I have seen them working as happily on asters in New Hampshire or Michigan as at home in Missouri. Snow asters are tough but dainty-appearing plants with small flowers—white rays around golden centers. The foliage is delicate and feathery, reminiscent of heather, which is the meaning of its Latin species name, erica. Snow asters grow wherever they can gain a roothold, filling abandoned fields and edging back roads with their delicate white blossoms. They do not mind drought or light frosts, and continue to bloom bravely from August until the arrival of the first killing frost. Snow asters are so common that they are seldom noticed except by bees and beekeepers, to whom they are among the most cheerful of flowers.
I can tell when the bees have started working asters, because the nectar they gather from them is rank, and I can smell the hives a long way off. The odor so struck me the first autumn I was keeping bees that I thought perhaps there was American Foulbrood, a deadly bacterial disease, in my hives. I had never yet been around a hive with this disease, but I had read that it could be detected by its unpleasant odor. Now that I know better, the smell of aster honey does not seem bad; it is a strong, fine scent, a sign that the bees will winter well.
I like to go out and check all the hives once before winter, and do so when it is still warm enough to open them for inspection if I need to. First, though, I suit up in bee coveralls. These are made of loose-cut white cotton, with zippers in all the right places to keep bees out. They are extra long in the legs so that they can be tucked into a pair of high-top work boots, and have a zipper around the shoulders that mates with the zipper on the bottom of the bee veil, which, in turn, is fitted to the crown of a lightweight helmet with an elastic band. I wear bee coveralls whenever I work my bees, and they are a good investment for any beginning beekeeper. Those new to bees are usually nervous about being stung, and the best way to avoid being stung is to relax and move easily and confidently among them. There is nothing that gives a person more confidence in the presence of bees than to be zipped snugly inside a bee suit.
I take along a few extra beehive parts to replace broken ones I noticed when I last visited the hives, as well as some two-foot lengths of board to put under the hives if I need to replace rotting ones. Dampness harms bees, and a few boards placed there allows air to circulate and keeps them dry. I also put in the back of my pickup a tall metal five-gallon can with the top removed to hold the bee smoker I use to quiet the bees—and the tools I’ll need to open the hives if I have to. I throw in a feed sack stuffed with baling twine to use as smoker fuel, some matches, my bee recordkeeping book, a pencil, my bee veil and helmet, long leather bee gauntlets, my lunch and a thermos of ice water. I am ready to go.
The first group of beeyards I am going to visit this autumn is thirty miles to the south, near one of the prettiest towns I know—though “town” is perhaps too grand a word to describe the grocery store, gas station and cluster of houses, each with a neatly kept vegetable garden, flowers and big trees. The place is squeezed in between two ranches, thousands of acres in extent.
The ranch to the east is so large that the two beeyards I have on it are five miles apart. It is a well-managed farm. Cattle and timber thrive there and the whole setup looks as though it were an illustration from an agricultural-school textbook. Yet for a variety of reasons the bees I have on this place are not particularly productive. I am selling off beehives as I gradually whittle down my operation to the one hundred hives I want to run, and these hives will be the ones I sell next.
Directly to the west, on the other ranch, not even five miles away, is one of my most productive beeyards; I have thirteen hives there this year, and it is where I am going first. I turn right past the grocery store, drive down a gravel road through the ranch and then stop to open a gate to the lane leading to my hives. I drive through, stop the pickup and close the gate. The first rule of country living is to leave gates the way one finds them: open when they are open, closed when they are closed.
The pasture has cows in it, and so I have my beeyard fenced against them. It is a minimal fence: wooden posts that I drove with some difficulty into the rocky ground, strung around with three strands of barbed wire. It takes less to keep cows out than in, and this fence is enough to protect the beehives from the cows, who like to rub against them. In the summer, when the bees are active, they will sting the cows and drive them off, but during the winter the bees become sluggish from cold and cannot defend themselves; the cows can knock over the beehives, or at the very least push off one of the covers. When that happens, the bees inside will chill and die.
The thirteen colonies of bees in this yard, like all my others, live inside two stacked hive bodies. People new to beekeeping tell me that one of the most confusing aspects of the craft is the vocabulary beekeepers use. “Hive bodies” are sometimes called “full-depth supers,” which is even more puzzling. A hive body is the basic unit of the beehive, standard at 99⁄16 inches by 1913⁄16 inches long by 16¼ inches wide. It is made of clear pine, cut with dovetailed corners to make it sturdy. Indentations are cut out of each side to serve as handgrips. I always drill a hole the size of a quarter in the front of each hive body for ventilation.
These hive bodies are often called “ten-frame hive bodies,” because it is customary to start new units with wooden frames that hold ten thin foundation sheets of pure beeswax, each one imprinted in a beeswax-processing factory with the matrix of the honeycomb cell that the bees would make if left on their own. On this foundation of wax, dimpled with the hexagonal honeycomb-cell pattern, the bees will build up deeper cells by adding to their foundation more wax secreted from their own bodies. Although the hexagonal cells approximate a circle, they fill the space without leaving gaps, maximizing the inside area relative to the supporting walls. This allows the bees the greatest possible volume for storing honey with the minimum of building.
These delicate wax foundation sheets are held in place by ten wooden frames suspended from the inside rabbeted front and back edges of the hive body, and may be removed easily if necessary. Before Lorenzo Langstroth, a nineteenth-century East Coast beekeeper, invented movable frames, beehives came in various forms and the bees were permitted to build permanent combs inside them. Unfortunately this meant that any work done by a beekeeper necessitated the destruction of the combs and the cruel, wholesale killing of the bees.
Beehive showing bottom board, hive bodies, frames, feeder, inner cover and telescoping cover
Frame held in frame grip
The impetus for Langstroth’s invention of the movable frame was his discovery of what has come to be called the “bee space.” Langstroth observed that bees always leave a gap of between a quarter to three-eighths of an inch between the combs they build on their own. This allows them to work on the combs and move about freely. They fill up spaces that are closer or wider than the “bee spaces” with interconnecting bridge comb. As long as the spaces between the frames of the hive are kept at approximately half an inch—a distance beekeepers quickly learn to judge by eye—the bees do not connect them with comb and the frames can be removed easily by the beekeeper with that handiest of beekeeping tools, a metal grasping device called a “frame grip.”
Lorenzo Langstroth interests me. He was not only a careful observer of bees, a man clever enough to invent the modern beehive, but also the author of a gracefully written and instructive book on beekeeping, The Hive and the Honeybee, first published in 1853. He imported and developed the strain of bees most beekeepers still use, the Italian race of Apis mellifera, the sweet bee. That he could do all this in one lifetime and yet be, by his own admission, mentally unbalanced for one half of it, has always struck me as an extraordinary and admirable example of human strength.
Langstroth, who was born on Christmas Day in 1810, was brought up in a conventional family and went to Yale, where he cooperated (participated is too strong a word) with what may have been the first college food riot, the 1828 Bread and Butter Rebellion. (“The bread was not always sweet nor the butter fresh,” he wrote in his Reminiscences.) He was later racked with guilt over his own minimal role in the ruckus: he had promised his mother to be good. He went on to study for the ministry, but upon attempting to preach his first sermon he was seized with hysterical voicelessness and was unable to deliver it. This was the start of what he called his “head troubles.” He turned to beekeeping as a health-giving outdoor occupation, but when he was suffering from one of his spells of melancholia, he could not even bear to sit within sight of his hives, nor even look at the letter “B.” He braved his way through his depressions by working chess problems until his mind cleared.
Langstroth was a prolific writer and journal keeper. His journals, which could be the key to an understanding of the man, may be seen at Cornell University, but present a formidable problem to the reader. Langstroth’s handwriting was so bad that during his lifetime his wife, from whom he lived apart, was the only person able to read it, and it was she who put his manuscripts into readable form. In addition to their illegibility, the journals are full of private codes, mirror writing and obscene symbols. Putting them into readable English has intrigued a number of people, including me. When I proposed the project to a publisher who specialized in beekeeping and related subjects, the editor stipulated, “There are some areas in the Langstroth journals, such as the ones dealing with his periodic bouts of depression, that we would just as soon see eliminated from any publication.” But it was this area that fascinated me: how a man so divided against himself could nevertheless contribute more useful knowledge and craft to the world in what was functionally only half a life than the rest of us, who are presumably in mental good health, do in the whole of our more ordinary lives. I dropped the proposal, and the Langstroth journals remain a scholarly challenge to someone with the patience, interest—and independent backing—to unlock them.
Once the bees have worked on the sheets of beeswax foundation in the ten frames and built full, fat combs in which they will raise young bees or store nectar and pollen, it is usual to remove one of the frames in order that the remaining nine can be handled by the beekeeper more easily while still making sure that the equally spaced distance between them does not violate the bees’ fussy and meticulous assessment of the bee space. It is for this reason that the standard ten-frame hive body, when it is in working order, usually contains only nine frames, which makes newcomers to the craft doubt a beekeeper’s ability to count.
I remove yet another frame from the bottom hive body, and put in its place on the extreme left a plastic feeder trough corresponding exactly to the dimensions of a drawn frame of comb but with an opening at the top. This is so that if I must feed the bees, I have a convenient place in which to pour the sugar syrup.
The two stacked hive bodies, one directly on top of the other, both rest on a wooden bottom board cut to the width of the hive body but with a few extra inches in front. Bottom boards are edged with a ridge around three sides that elevates the hive bodies, providing a space under the frames for the bees to walk about. Its open edge, where the projecting inches of bottom board face the front, make an entrance with a small porch; the bees use this as an alighting platform when they fly into the hive. I prefer to use cypress lumber for these bottom boards, as it is rot resistant. Although I always put hives up on boards to keep them off the damp ground, bottom boards made of pine tend to rot away even when they are treated with creosote.
This unit—bottom board and two stacked hive bodies—is topped with a flat wooden inner cover cut to the dimensions of the top of the hive body. It has a center hole to allow moisture to escape from the beehive beneath, and is overtopped with what beekeepers call a “telescoping cover.” Almost all beekeepers, except for migratory ones, use this type of cover on their hives. Telescoping covers are cut slightly larger than the width and length of the hive body, and are rimmed with an overhanging edge that keeps them in place in windy weather. A fitted sheet of galvanized metal protects them from rain and snow and makes them last longer. Beekeeping supply companies ship all hive and frame parts knocked down; they must be assembled and nailed together, so a beekeeper learns to be something of a carpenter, too.
The first thing to do in a beeyard after zipping oneself into a bee suit is to take the bee smoker from its metal carrying can and light it. A bee smoker is a cylindrical firebox, compact enough to hold easily in one hand, with a small bellows attached to its edge and a hinged, cone-shaped top with a hole in it. Fuel is put in through the top opening, and the air is forced across it after it is lighted and smoldering by squeezing the bellows. This directs the smoke out of the hole in the top in puffs that will quiet the bees. The smoke makes them act as though their hives were on fire: they forget about tending their home and prepare to abandon it by filling themselves with honey; when their bodies are filled, it is difficult for the bees to bend themselves into a stinging posture.
Keeping a fire burning in a bee smoker might seem tricky to a novice beekeeper, but it really is not hard. I scrape out whatever charred fuel remains from the last time I used the smoker, then wad up a half sheet of newspaper, stick it inside and light it. When the paper is burning smartly, I put in a few lengths of loosely rolled baling twine and force air through the fire with the bellows, adding more twine before closing the top of the smoker and stuffing a wad of it in my pocket to add later. Once the fuel is burning thoroughly, the smoker may be filled all the way to the top and will smolder for hours without needing to be refueled; it will produce the thick, cool smoke that is best and gentlest for the bees. Hot smoke with sparks flying from it will incinerate them.
I use baling twine for fuel because a cattle farmer from whom I rent a beeyard takes it from the hay bales he feeds his animals in winter, stuffs it into feed sacks and loads my pickup full of it every spring. It is handy to carry around and burns well. A variety of materials may be used to fuel a smoker, though. Strips of denim or other heavyweight cotton are good, but they must be one hundred percent cotton: artificial fibers produce a foul stench and their smoke makes the bees cross. Dried grass, autumn leaves, pine needles and dried clusters of sumac fruits also make splendid smoker fuel.
Smoker
When my smoker is burning well, I pull on my leather bee gauntlets and pick up the two tools I may need—the frame grips and my hive tool. “Hive tool” is the beekeeper’s name for a small prybar, a jimmy. If there is anything bees hate it is a draft, so they weld shut the cracks between the hive parts with a gummy substance called propolis or bee glue, which they manufacture from plant resins. When a beekeeper opens a hive, he must use a hive tool to break this carefully built glue seal. One of the reasons I like to make this inspection trip to my beeyards early in the autumn is that I want to give the bees plenty of time to seal themselves back up before winter’s cold begins. When I open a hive, all their meticulously crafted seals are broken, and they will have to make more propolis and chink up their hives again to preserve the warmth they generate in cold weather.
Hive tool
I don’t expect to have to open many hives in this particular yard. Year after year, the bees have wintered well here because they have gathered so much aster honey. I smelled it as soon as I stepped out of the pickup, and when I walk toward the hives, I can see streams of bees flying purposefully in and out of their entrances, a sign that they are hard at work on a nectar flow. When only a few flowers are blooming, the bees fly around in a desultory way, and often, if the weather is warm, they hang aimlessly on the front of the hive or stand in bunches on the alighting board. Today, the bees are active; the ones returning to their hives fly low, heavy with nectar. A quick check of the front of the row of hives shows only one that may be in trouble. A heap of fine, powdery beeswax obstructs part of the entrance. I make a mental note to open that hive and check it. Beehives should always be opened and worked from their rear in order not to intrude on the bees’ flight path. Bees are singleminded and fly directly to their destination. Today they are flying straight to the field of snow asters I can see across the river branch. If I were to stand in their way, it would divert and annoy them; they might sting.
I move behind the row of hives and put my hand in the handgrip of the bottom hive body on the first hive in the row, hefting it to estimate its weight. It is heavy with honey; its bees should winter well. I have made a note to replace a broken inner cover on the second hive, so I pick up the smoker and puff a stream of smoke into the hive entrance to subdue the guard bees posted there and prevent them from spreading an alarm. With my hive tool I loosen the telescoping cover and take it off, prying up the broken inner cover and puffing more smoke into the top of the hive, which is filled with bees in bustling numbers. They have felt the jarring disturbance, and their abdomens are raised defensively, ready to sting if necessary. The smoke, however, creates a more immediate concern, and they scurry down between the frames to avoid it. I toss the broken inner cover in the direction of the pickup, replace it with a new one and close the hive.
I work my way down the row of hives, hefting them and assuring myself that they are all in good shape. One needs a few boards under it to maintain an air space from the ground. Carefully, without bothering to smoke the bees, I lift up the front and back edges of the hive and push the boards under it. When I come to the hive I thought might be in trouble, I find that it is much lighter than the others and its honey stores are low. There are not many bees inside, and the ones that are there are clustered over only a few frames in the upper hive body. At this time of year, a normal bee colony is still close to its summertime strength of about 60,000 bees. There can’t be even a quarter of this number here. I loosen some of the frames with my hive tool and use my frame grips to pull it out. The frame has recently had honey but now it contains no honey at all. The ragged edges of the wax sealing the honeycomb show that the cells have been ripped open hurriedly and carelessly to get at the honey stored inside. This is a colony of bees too weak to defend itself from other bees, and it has been robbed of its honey by more spirited neighbors. The powdery wax I had spotted at the hive entrance earlier meant that the honeycomb had been opened by intruders, for in a strong, well-regulated colony the bees never leave any debris in their own hive.
A check of the rest of the frames shows the bees to be free of disease, although there are signs that wax moth larvae and cockroaches, opportunists that they are, have begun to take advantage of a hive of bees too few in number and too poor in morale to defend itself from enemies. The nondescript, medium-sized gray wax moths lay their eggs in beehives whenever they can, and after hatching, their larvae—wriggling dirty-white caterpillars—feed on honeycombs, destroying them in the process if the bees are unable to kill them first.
“I had some bees once,” I hear from now-and-again beekeepers, “but the moths got ’em.” This is confusing the sign with its cause. Wax moths are everywhere. A strong bee colony can defend itself from their damage, but once there is a drop in strength and morale the balance will tip in favor of the wax moths.
As I check the frames of this hive, I find there are a few bee larvae being raised by worker bees. This indicates that they still have a queen, the single fertile female bee each colony requires. I check my record book and find this was one of my most productive hives the previous year, and that early in August I had taken six honey supers from it. “Honey supers” are about half the height of a regular hive body, and stack on top of the hives. In them the bees store the extra honey that a beekeeper may safely remove—this is his honey crop. Because honey supers are smaller than hive bodies, they are lighter and easier to handle, easier to carry empty to the hives in springtime and easier to remove filled at the end of summer.
The six supers I took from this colony are, on the average, twice the number an ordinary colony will fill with honey. So a few months ago this colony contained a greater number of bees than an average colony does. There may have been 100,000 or more only recently. What happened to them?
Over the years, I have discovered that certain bee colonies—particularly prosperous hardworking ones like this one had been—sometimes feel impossibly crowded when their supers are taken away and they are reduced to their basic two hive bodies. This is one of the reasons why they swarm—that is, split a parent colony into two and fly off with the old queen to take up new quarters in a hollow tree or under the siding of a building. Bees usually swarm in the spring, but occasionally I see swarms in the autumn, after the supers have been removed. This is not good survival strategy for the bees. The autumn swarm that buds off from the original colony will not have enough time to set up a new, well-stocked household before the frosts come and kill the flowers. And the parent colony, even though it has raised a new queen, is usually too weak to defend itself against robber bees and contains too few bees to winter well. This is probably what has happened with this colony.
If I had just a few hives rather than three hundred, this late swarming would be easy to prevent. If I put an empty super with ten frames of foundation on a hive when I remove the filled honey supers, the bees would have enough space and enough to do to prevent the swarming impulse from developing. But the additional expense of keeping three hundred foundation-filled supers on hand, and the labor of putting them on and taking them off just to prevent a few swarms doesn’t make sense from a commercial beekeeping standpoint. However, if I leave these bees as they are, they will surely die over the winter. Their unprotected combs will be destroyed by wax moth larvae. The beekeepers’ maxim—take your winter losses in the fall—is a sound one. I shall add these bees to another hive, and use the old beehive parts to make a new replacement hive in the spring.
“Adding the bees to another hive” sounds simple. It isn’t. If I just dumped these bees in with others, they would all be killed as intruders. Every hive is made up of three castes: the drones, the workers and the queen. The drones are the male bees, present only in the spring and of no concern in the fall, when all but one of the bees in each of the colonies are members of the worker-bee caste. Workers are females with atrophied sexual characteristics, and they do nearly all the work in the hive. They gather nectar and pollen, make propolis, raise young bees, build comb, make honey, defend the hive and take care of the queen. The queen is the single representative in each hive of the third caste of bees. She is a fertile female, mother to all the bees in the colony. By being constantly touched and fed by her daughters she spreads her own special chemical marker—a pheromone—throughout the colony. It is this that makes each colony unique and distinct from any other. Queen bees are jealous and cannot bear the presence of another queen. When two queens meet, they fight to the death. And if the offspring of two different queens are abruptly forced together, they will do the same.
Before uniting this weaker colony with a stronger one, I must find the queen of the poorer colony and kill her. I do not want to give her the chance to kill the queen in the prospering hive where I shall house her bees. The queen, a long, elegant bee, is easy to find among the shorter, stubbier workers, especially in such a small colony. I find her quickly, and—regretfully, because I do not like to harm bees—I kill her with the sharp end of my hive tool.
Honey bees
The bees from the weaker colony, however, still carry the pheromone from their late queen. Until it fades, they will be instantly recognizable as foreigners by the bees with whom I want to join them. If I were at home and could return easily to these particular hives, I should unite the two colonies by putting the upper hive body—the only part of the hive that contains bees—of the queenless colony directly on top of the hive next to it, separating them with a sheet of newspaper. The bees, fussy in their dislike of foreign material in their hives, would then set themselves the task of chewing the newspaper away and, gradually and cooperatively, the two sets of bees would meet quietly and not fight and kill. This is the surest and kindest way to unite two hives. But to try and do this here would involve driving back in a week’s time and reducing the combined three-story colony to two so that the bees would not have such a large interior space to keep warm throughout the winter. I do not have the time, and I take a shortcut, one of many I must practice as a commercial beekeeper.