1. The common hives fail to furnish adequate protection in Winter, against cold, and those sudden changes to unseasonable warmth, by which bees are tempted to come out and perish in large numbers on the snow; and the colonies are thus prevented from breeding on a large scale, as early as they otherwise would. Under such circumstances, they can make no profitable use of the early honey-harvest; and they will swarm so late, if they swarm at all, as to have but little opportunity for laying up surplus honey, while often they do not gather enough even for their own use, and their owner closes the season by purchasing honey to preserve them from starvation. The way in which I give the bees that amount of protection in Winter, which conduces most powerfully to early swarming, has already been described in the Chapter on Protection. 2. Another serious objection to all the ordinary swarming hives, is the vexatious fact that if the bees swarm at all, they are liable to swarm so often as to destroy the value of both the parent stock and the after-swarms. Experienced bee-keepers obviate this difficulty, by uniting second swarms, so as to make one good colony out of two; and they return to the parent stock all swarms after the second, and even this if the season is far advanced. Such operations consume much time, and often give much more trouble than they are worth. By removing all the queen cells but one, after the first swarm has left, second swarming in my hives will always be prevented; and by removing all but two, provision may be made for the issue of second swarms, and yet all after-swarming be prevented. The process of returning after-swarms is not only objectionable, on account of the time it requires, having often to be repeated again and again before one queen is allowed to destroy the others; but it also causes a large portion of the gathering season to be wasted; for the bees seem unwilling to work with energy, so long as the pretensions of several rival queens are unsettled.