fears are operated upon, or excited, by unusual, and to them, no doubt, terrible sounds made by even "gently tapping" their inverted-hive--their house turned upside down. Though no advocate for suffocating Bees, but the contrary--a decided opponent to it, I agree in opinion with my correspondent that suffocation at once is preferable to the very reprehensible practice of "driving a hive," inasmuch as an instantaneous death is preferable to a lingering and unnatural one by starvation, which, whatever may befal the driven Bees, is the hard, untimely fate of the brood and young larvæ of a hive when the Queen and commoners are driven from them into a new and empty domicil. They leave, because they are forced to leave behind them, and to perish, thousands of the young brood in a state of helplessness. Their mother and their nurses are driven into banishment and pauperism, while her offspring are doomed to perish for the want of their aid and support. If driving be practised early in the season, that is in June or July, all the brood then in the driven hive must inevitably perish; if later, it is hardly to be expected that the surviving Bees will or can prosper. Can the Bee-master for a moment think that when Bees are so driven from their old hive, they will work in their new one, as if they had swarmed voluntarily and then been put into it: it is some considerable time before Bees thus treated will work vigorously; and during that time of lingering and irresolution the honey-season fast declines,--the Bees' difficulties multiply,--and they become paupers at a time they should be rich. Nine times out of ten the hive so treated perishes by famine, and like the young brood, dies the worst of deaths,--the whole hive becomes a melancholy wreck, and is absolutely sacrificed to the mistaken notions of the speculating, or experiment-making proprietor. It is a practice of which _I disapprove altogether_: and I am surprised that any one could so far misunderstand the principles and nature of my practice as to recommend the driving of Bees out of a full hive into an empty one as an admirable addition to my Bee-hive--that is--to my Bee-boxes. I have the satisfaction, however, to state that in the management of Bees in my boxes _no driving is necessary, nor even possible_: by them _driving_ and _suffocation_ are both superseded, and rendered as useless to operators as they have long been destructive to Bees,--and, I cannot but say--disgraceful to apiarians. What I have already said (in page 48) I will here repeat with as much emphasis as I am able, because that passage comprehends the very essence of my directions relative to the management of Bees in the middle-box,--and because those directions are utterly incompatible with _driving_. "I say, then, DISTURB NOT THIS HIVE--THIS PAVILION OF NATURE: WEAKEN NOT ITS POPULATION; RUT SUPPORT ITS INFLUENCE, AND EXTEND TO IT THOSE ACCOMMODATIONS WHICH NO PRACTICE, EXCEPT MY OWN, HAS YET PUT INTO