d
with the honey, making it thin, and that the bees eating so much water
with their food, would affect them as described. Some experiments that
followed, induced me to assign cold as the cause, as I always found,
when I put them where it was sufficiently warm, that an immediate cure
was the result, or at least, it enabled them to retain their faeces till
set out in the spring.

BURYING BEES.

Burying bees in the earth below the frost, has been recommended as a
superior method of wintering, for small families. I have known it
confidently asserted, that they would lose nothing in weight, and no
bees would die. I found, in testing it, that a medium quantity of honey
sufficed, and but very few were lost, perhaps less than by any other
method. Yet the combs were mouldy, and unfit for further use. There was
no escape for the vapor and dampness of the earth. This did not satisfy
me; it only cured "one disease by instituting another." I saved the
bees, (and perhaps some honey), but the combs were spoiled.

EXPERIMENTS OF THE AUTHOR TO GET RID OF THE FROST.

I wished to keep them warm, and save the bees as well as honey, and at
the same time, get rid of the moisture. I found that a large family
expelled it much better than small ones; and if all were put together
in a close room, the animal heat from a large number combined, would be
an advantage to the weak ones, at least,--this proved of some benefit.
Yet I found on the sides of a glass hive, that large drops of water
would stand for weeks.

SUCCESS IN THIS MATTER.

The following suggestion then came to my relief. If this hive was
bottom up, what would prevent all this vapor as it arises from the bees
from passing off? (It always rises when warm, if permitted.) The hive
was inverted; in a few hours the glass was dry.

This was so perfectly simple, that I wondered I had not thought of it
before, and wondered still more that some one of the many intelligent
apiarians had never discovered it. I immediately inverted every hive in
the room, and kept them in this way till spring; when the combs were
perfectly bright, not a particle of mould to be seen, and was well
satisfied with the result of my experiment. Although I was fearful that
more bees would leave the hives when inverted, than if right side up,
yet the result showed no difference. I had now tried both methods, and
had some means of judging.

BEES WHEN IN THE HOUSE SHOULD BE KEPT PERFECTLY DARK.

When no