oise; in other words, they take active
exercise in order to keep warm! If a thermometer is pushed up among
them, it will indicate a high temperature, even when the external
atmosphere is many degrees below zero. When the bees are unable to
maintain the necessary amount of animal heat, an occurrence which is
very common with small colonies in badly protected hives, then, as a
matter of course, they must perish.

Extreme cold, when of long continuance, very frequently destroys
colonies in thin hives, even when they are strong both in bees and
honey. The inside of such hives, is often filled with frost, and the
bees, after eating all the food in the combs in which they are
clustered, are unable to enter the frosty combs, and thus starve in the
midst of plenty. The unskilfull bee-keeper who finds an abundance of
honey in the hives, cannot conjecture the cause of their death.

If the cold merely destroyed feeble colonies, or strong ones only now
and then, it would not be so formidable an enemy; but every year, it
causes many of the most flourishing stocks to perish by starvation. The
extra quantity of food which they are compelled to eat, in order to keep
up their heat in their miserable hives, is often the turning point with
them, between life and death. They starve, when with proper protection,
they would have had food enough and to spare.

But some one may say, "What possible difference can the kind of hives in
which bees are kept make in the quantity of food which they will
consume?" Enough, I would reply, in some single winters, to pay the
difference between a good hive and a bad one!

I cannot move my finger, or wink my eye-lids without some waste of
muscle, however small; for it is a well-ascertained law in our animal
economy, that all _muscular exertion_ is attended with a corresponding
_waste_ of muscular fibre. Now this waste must be supplied by the
consumption of food, and it would be as unreasonable to expect constant
heat from a stove without fresh supplies of fuel, as incessant muscular
activity from an insect, without a supply of food proportioned to that
activity. If then we can contrive any way to keep our bees in almost
perfect quiet during the Winter, we may be certain that they will need
much less food than when they are constantly excited.

In the cold Winter of 1851-2, I kept two swarms in a perfectly dry and
dark cellar, where the temperature was remarkably uniform, seldom
varying two degrees from