CHAPTER XIII.
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.