A beehive must serve the dual purpose of being a home for a colony of bees and at the same time a tool for the beekeeper. Its main requirements are along the line of its adaptation to the various manipulations of the apiary in so far as these do not materially interfere with the protection and comfort it affords the colony of bees. Since rapid manipulation is greatly facilitated by simple and uniform apparatus, one of the fundamental requirements of the equipment in hives is that they be of the same style and size, with all parts exactly alike and interchangeable throughout the apiary. While the hives and equipment should be as simple and inexpensive as possible, consistent with their various functions, a cheap and poorly constructed beehive is, all things considered, an expensive piece of apparatus. In this country the Langstroth (or L) frame (9-1/8 by 17-5/8 inches) (fig. 1) is the standard frame and throughout this paper frames of brood will be discussed in terms of this size of frame. The advantages of standard frames and hives are so great that the beekeeper can not afford to ignore them for the sake of some slight advantage of another size. There is, however, a wide difference of opinion as to the number of frames that should be used in a single hive body. The wide variation in the building up of colonies previous to the honey flow in different localities and seasons, the race of bees, and the skill of the beekeeper are all factors entering into this problem, which make it improbable that beekeepers will ever fully agree on this point. The races that build up more rapidly in the spring are, of course, other things being equal, able to use to advantage a larger brood chamber than the races that are more conservative in brood rearing. It is also noticeable that within certain limits as the beekeeper's skill in building up his colonies for the flow increases, so the size of the brood chamber best adapted to his purpose increases. In other words, while the careful and skillful beekeeper may succeed in having large brood chambers well filled with brood at the beginning of the honey flow, the less skillful beekeeper under similar conditions may be doing well to approximate this condition with a much smaller brood chamber. [Illustration: Fig. 1.--A 10-frame hive with comb-honey super and perforated zinc queen excluder. (From Phillips.)]