THE HONEY BEE.

Maori Messenger : Te Karere Maori, Volume 4, Issue 62, 8 May 1851, Page 4

THE HONEY BEE.

No. 4. (From the Family Economist.) We are under the necessity of omitting a portion of the fourth article of the Economist, It is that portion which treats of the construction of wooilen hives, and the advantages to be derived to the Bee keeper by so arranging them 4s to have a bell glass, or small hive, placed upon the top of these boxes. The manner of placing these hives and obtaining a much larger quantity of line honey is clearly shown; hut, to accomplish that clearness, the text ol the Economist is illustrated by engravings which, as we do not possess, we have preferred omitting matter which, without tlnir Aid, we fear would prove hardly intelligible. A i-imple plan called Nadir Hiving, or hiving d -wnwiird*, is sometime* adopted with •very good effect. Bees appear to have a strong desire to work downwards rather than in any

oilier diri'Ction, so thai in giving tliem room t below, we only foil** nature , in which we 1 cannot ilo wrong There need not be much expense connected with this method. A hoard may be put on a common butter-tub, mid fastened down to it ; there must be two holes made in the hoard, and ihe hive placed upon it, shortly before swarming lime. The bees, instead of lenving the hive in a swarm, will occupy (he tub, and the temperature of this being lower than that of the hive, the queen will not descend, but remain above for breeding; and the honey and wax made in the tub, will consequently be pure and of fine quality. I. W. Je>lon, Esquire, of HenIcy, states that with this contrivance he found twenty six pounds of honey in the. tub, beside* whnt was in the hive for the bees to ive 011 j so he look the honey in the tub lor his use, and replaced it to be filled again. We do not think it necessary to enter into ihe ( xpl inaiion of all the plans which linve been devised for the purpose of bee-husban-dry, as they are much inure complicated than the methods we have shown ; some are very expensive, and adapted only for those who follow the pursuit for recreation alone. We can confidently recommend ihe plans described aj simple, inexpensive, and effective, and far more | rofitahle .lh.nl the old method ; on Ihisc point, one writer says : " On the old plan of burning the bees, a cottager's stock is sometimes large, •ometimes small. After a bad honey year, he is often tempted to burn many of his good old stocks in order In makeup by numbers the same quantity of honey which in better years he gets from few. Suppose lie leaves three slocks, of which two stand tile winter, and the next year turns out a very good bee year, ho is then not ready to make the most of it, and of course only gets one-tenth of the honey which he would if lie had twenty stocks as lie ought to have. Man has nothing to do wilh the weather, as I said before ; ami I am very glad of it, for I am sure i». is managed much belter as it is. All I can do is, to show you how you may make the most of a good year, get a fair quantity in a middling year, and not loose, all your bees (as many people do) in a bad one. " It is found that in ten years four are very bad years, four middling years, and two very uooil, when almost any quantity of honey may be got on a good plan. Two liundre ' and ninety pounds have been taken from one stock without hurling the bees, while the heaviest cottage-hive 1 ever heard of, was under 100 lbs. If I with ten stocks, get 60 lbs. of honey from each, which i easily can do without destroying one of my stocks, am I not better off at the end of the year than you, whose ten stocks have all swarmed, and who, when you take up all the swarms in the autumn, think yourselves well off if you get '2O lbs. from each } You get 200 lbs. I get 600 lbs. of honey." Mr. Nutt, too, states that in one season, from May '27ih to June 13>h, he obtained 183 lbs. of honey from one stock of bees. Now, if we take the (Eng'ish) value of this honey to be but one shilling per lb. we have £9 for the IS3 lbs. of hoiiey. But fine honey (in England) is really worth double this value, so that a cottager possessing two or three stocks of tiees, may, by proper managetment, fully reulize the amount of profit we set down in our first article—namely, from ( £lO to .€ls n year. We must frankly confess that we have not realized such large results from our bees as those of Mr. Nutt's ; yet we ought not to doubt tho accuracy of that gentleman's statement; and we feel sure that any person who faithfully follows our methods, attending strictly to ventilation, will be well rewarded for his trouble.