If the use of the common patent hives could only keep the stocks strong in numbers, and if the bee-keepers would always see that they were well supplied with honey, then I admit that to kill the bees would be both cruel and unnecessary. Such however, are the discouragements and losses necessarily attending the use of any hive which does not give the control of the combs, that there will be few who do not continually find that some of their stocks are too feeble to be worth the labor and expense of attempting to preserve them over Winter. How many colonies are annually wintered, which are not only of no value to their owner, but are positive nuisances in his Apiary; being so feeble in the Spring, that they are speedily overcome by the moth, and answer only to breed a horde of destroyers to ravage the rest of his Apiary. The time spent upon them is often as absolutely wasted, as the time devoted to a sick animal incurably diseased, and which can never be of any service, while by nursing it along, its owner incurs the risk of infecting his whole stock with its deadly taint. If, on the score of kindness, he should shut it up, and let it starve to death, few of us, I imagine, would care to cultivate a very intimate acquaintance with one so extremely original in the exhibition of his humanity! Ever since the introduction of patent hives, the notion has almost universally prevailed, that stocks must not, under _any_ circumstances, be voluntarily broken up; and hence, instead of Apiaries, filled in the Spring, with strong and healthy stocks of bees, easily able to protect themselves against the bee-moth, and all other enemies, we have multitudes of colonies which, if they had been kept on purpose to furnish food for the worms, could scarcely have answered a more valuable end in encouraging their increase. The simple truth is, that improved hives, without an improved system of management, have done on the whole more harm than good; in no country have they been so extensively used as in our own, and no where has the moth so completely gained the ascendency. Just so far as they have discouraged bee-keepers from the old plan of killing off all their weak swarms in the Fall, just so far have they extended "aid and comfort" to the moth, and made the condition of the bee-keeper worse than it was before. That some of them might be managed so as in all ordinary cases, to give the bees complete protection against their scourge, I do not, for a moment, question; but that they cannot, from the very nature of the case, answer fully in all emergencies, the ends for which they were designed, I shall endeavor to prove and not to assert.