a dark place, and
found that in about an hour's time, they had begun to enlarge some of
the cells, to raise a new queen! If the Apiarian has sealed queens on
hand, they ought, by all means, to be given to the nuclei, in order to
save all the time possible.

I sometimes make these nuclei as follows. The suitable comb with bees
&c., is taken from a stock-hive, and set in an empty one, made to stand
partly in the place of the old hive, which, of course, must previously
be moved a little on one side. In this way, I am able to direct a
considerable number of the bees from the old stock to my nucleus, and
the necessity of shutting it up, is done away with. If the bees from the
old stock do not enter the small one, in sufficient numbers, I sometimes
close their hive, so that the returning bees can find no other place to
enter. My object is not to catch up a _large_ number of bees. For
reasons previously assigned, I do not want enough to build new comb, but
only enough to adhere to the removed comb, and raise a new queen from
the brood, or develop the sealed one which has been given them. A short
time after one nucleus has in this way, been formed, another may be made
by moving the old hive again, and so a third or fourth, if so many are
wanted. This plan requires considerable skill and experience, to secure
the right number of bees, without getting too many.

If bees are to be made to enter a new hive, by removing the old one from
its stand, it will always be very desirable not only to have the new one
contain a piece of comb, but a considerable number of bees _clustered_
on that comb. I repeatedly found my bees, after entering the hive,
refuse to have anything to do with the brood comb, and for a long time,
I was unable to conjecture the cause; until I ascertained that they were
dissatisfied with its deserted appearance, and that, by taking the
precaution to have it well covered with bees, I seldom failed to
reconcile them to my system of forced colonization. I can usually tell,
in less than two minutes, whether the operation will succeed or not. If
the returning bees are content, they will, however much agitated at
first, soon begin to join the cluster on the comb; while if they are
dissatisfied, they will abandon the hive, and nearly all the bees that
were originally on the comb, will leave with them. They seem capricious
in this matter, and are sometimes so very self-willed, that they refuse
to have anything to do with th