MANNER OF UNITING NEW SWARMS.
Feeble and tardy swarms can do no good excepting in very fine seasons.
In bad seasons they greatly weaken the hives that produce them, without
being able to shift for themselves. In ordinary years, they can only
be preserved by much care, and at the expence of a great deal of
honey; and most of them die, after all, without bringing any profit to
their master. I have saved some that have turned out well, but only
at the end of two or even three years; and I advise no one to try
the experiment unless they have a great deal of honey to spare. It is
better to unite them, and proceed after the following method:--
When two small swarms come off the same day, I gather them separately,
and leave them at the foot of the tree or hush on which they have
alighted. Towards evening I spread a table-cloth on the ground, on
which, by a smart and sudden movement, I shake all the bees out of one
of the hives, and immediately take the other and place it gently over
the bees that are heaped together on the cloth, and they instantly
ascend into it, flapping their wings, and join those which, not having
been disturbed, are quiet in their new abode. Early next morning I
remove this newly united hive to the place it is destined to occupy.
This doubled population works with double success, and in the most
perfect harmony; and generally becomes a powerful colony, from which
a great profit is derived. Two feeble swarms may be united after the
same manner, although one of them may have come off some days later
than the other, and the first may have constructed combs; taking care,
however, not to make the first one enter the second, but the second
the first, as the bees will ascend more readily to join those that have
already begun to make honey and to hatch brood; and next day they will
proceed together, with increased ardour, with the work which the first
had already begun, and which will now advance more rapidly from the
increase of the labourers. It is to be understood, that, after this
union, the hive should be placed early next morning in the same place
where the oldest of the swarms has already passed some days.
I have recommended the uniting of swarms to be effected in the evening,
when the bees are quietly housed for the night. If it were to be during
the day, when the labourers are in full activity, they might fight and
kill one another, to the total destruction of one of the swarms, which
I have seen happen more than once. But in the evening they are grouped
together; those that have been displaced alight upon, and take hold
of, the others, and thus merely extend the cluster, now composed of
two distinct masses, the one covering the other: their peace is never
disturbed, and next day they work together in perfect harmony. Their
fighting is always after the fashion of a duel, and not of a battle. In
their wars, they do not range themselves in close battle lines, like
men, breaking through and overturning each other; they fight bee to
bee, excepting in cases of plunder or the killing of the drones, and
then the combatant who first engages in the attack is speedily assisted
by all those within reach uniting their forces to overthrow the
enemy. But when the whole of a new swarm, suddenly displaced, ascends
precipitately into a hive, peaceably occupied by another, the bees of
each colony cannot recognize each other, and having no field to fight
after their own fashion, they pass the night together, and, doubtless,
acquiring the same smell, live happily together. But such is not the
case when we wish to make a swarm enter an old hive, or to unite it
to one whose hive is already full of honey-combs. Then another way of
proceeding, and precautions of another kind, are necessary, concerning
which I shall now give directions.