Constructive Beekeeping: The Classic Guide for the Practical Beekeeper

CONSTRUCTIVE BEEKEEPING: The Classic Guide for the Practical Beekeeper provides expert instructions on building and maintaining beehives, offering detailed and easy to follow techniques for all phases of honey production with specific emphasis on temperature, wind, moisture, evaporation, sunshine, altitude and fostering the fertility and vigor of the queen. "Bees always respond to similar treatment under like conditions by giving uniform results. The beekeepers' trouble is that he makes his treatments uniform but not his conditions." "Commercial beekeeping has for its object the production of the maximum quantity of well ripened honey at a minimum of cost. Swarming adds greatly to the cost of producing honey. Most methods of swarm-prevention have in them the element of destructiveness. Ventilating, removing the queen, shaking the bees, removing the brood, exchanging brood-bodies, loosening the cover, all destroying something that the bees have done, or adding to the work to be done in the hive. Let me state here that you are not going to be told that absolute swarm-prevention is a possibility, nor will you be told that honey can be produced by absent treatment. What you will get from a good understanding of the following pages is that the beekeeper who takes advantage of the laws relating to condensation of vapor, and follows where the bees have been leading will have advanced one step nearer the swarm less bee. Instead of going to the hive and telling the bees (by manipulations) "don't do this"; say to them "keep all your brood, keep your queen, keep the cold damp air out of the hive and I will make your hive so perfect a condenser of water vapor that the work of evaporating water from the nectar will be done quickly." We will bring team-work into play, and each get the benefit of every advantage gained. Constructive beekeeping helps by getting the honey ripened quickly each night and stored out of the way of the queen. The hive will then be maintained in such a condition that the bees have the greatest amount of comfort in relation to the results produced." "When we compare evaporation by the aid of ventilation with that which takes place aided by condensation, and give this an application of the laws of heat, with its three ways of communication; conduction, convection and radiation, the tension of vapors; and the stillness, dryness and density of the atmosphere, our conclusion must be that condensation is so uniform in its results, that it eliminates everything ascribed to locality, but the number of flowers and the weather conditions that affect the flight of bees and the flow of nectar. All other Conditions, by the aid of condensation, can be controlled by the beekeeper. Ventilation and shade each make more room in the hive, but not with uniformity under all conditions; So we must add to the treatments we give the bees, a well varnished inner surface to the hive, and a cover that, at no time, permits of upward ventilation. Then the bees will be able to keep the nectar out of the way of a queen, whose egg-laying capacity is increasing daily. Room, and the procedure whereby the bees automatically make more room as they need it, is the single thing that we have to consider in urge prevention."