quiet, they should be carried to the place where they are intended to remain permanently, from whence they will soon begin to roam the fields in search of materials to furnish their new home. It is customary among the cottagers to make a noise when bees are swarming, generally by striking a frying-pan smartly with a large key. This they do from a notion that it will charm the bees down, but the experience of all intelligent apiarians has proved this to be a useless practice. While furnishing their hive with combs the great bulk of the bees suspend themselves from its roof, in a cluster, consisting of a succession of semicircular festoons, one within the other, and they keep up such a degree of warmth as to render their waxen materials soft enough to be easily moulded. To enable themselves to form this cluster, they cling to each other by their claws, the fore feet of one bee hanging upon the hind legs of the one above it. This clustering prevents their earliest proceedings from being witnessed in hives of the usual form. This, however, is a difficulty which ingenious apiarians have found means to overcome, by the use of a unicomb or mirror hive, one of which I shall be well pleased to show any lady or gentleman who may feel inclined to see the construction of it, and the facilities it affords for observation. I shall now put you in possession of what I conceive to be the simplest, cheapest, and most profitable mode of managing bees. There are two prominent systems in use directed to these objects, each based upon the importance of giving room to the bees, and diminishing thereby their disposition to swarm. By one of these systems we are directed to place the hives or boxes side by side (the collateral system); the other system advocates the piling of the boxes one upon another (the storifying system), affording in both cases a free communication between the boxes whenever required. I have tried both systems myself, and have taken considerable pains to ascertain the success of others, who have also given both an ample trial. The result has been to give me a decided opinion in favour of storifying, and indeed many of my acquaintances, who had originally been induced to adopt the collateral plan, have wholly abandoned it for that of storifying. Whichever of these modes he had recourse to, it has been found that the bees have a regular habit of constructing their combs at uniform distances from each other; but they have also another habit, when they are untutored, viz., that of building them irregularly, insomuch that their position is frequently curvilinear, and sometimes they are even placed at right angles with each other. This proceeding forms a great impediment to the manipulation of wax and honey. It is an impediment, however, which the mere cottager pays little regard to, and blunders through it. But to the scientific apiarian it is indispensably necessary to avoid these various incurvations. To accomplish this desirable object, every box