"The bee works, and lives, I believe, solely by instinct. I do not consider it an inventive, or very ingenious insect. To succeed well, its accommodations should be of the _simplest_ and _securest_ form. Therefore, instead of adopting the complicated plans of many of the patent hives, I have made, and used a simple box, like that now before you, containing a cube of one foot square _inside_--made of one and a quarter inch sound pine plank, well jointed and planed on all sides, and put together perfectly tight at the joints, with white lead ground in oil, and the inside of the hive at the bottom champered off to three-eighths of an inch thick, with a door for the bees in front, of four inches long by three-eighths of an inch high. I do this, that there may be a thin surface to come in contact with the shelf on which they rest, thus preventing a harbor for the bee-moth. (I have never used a patent hive which would exclude the bee-moth, nor any one which would so well do it as this, having never been troubled with that scourge since I used this tight hive.) On the top of the hive, an inch or two from the front, is made a passage for the bees, of an inch wide, and six to eight inches long, to admit the bees into an upper hive for surplus honey, (which passage is covered, when no vessel for that purpose is on the top.) For obtaining the honey, I use a common ten or twelve-quart water pail, inverted, with the bail turned over, in which the bees deposit their surplus, like the sample before you. The pail will hold about twenty pounds of honey. This is simple, cheap, and expeditious; the pail costing not exceeding twenty-five cents, is taken off in a moment, the bail replaced, and the honey ready for transportation, or market, and _always in place_. If there is time for more honey to be made, (my bees made two pails-full in succession this year,) another pail can be put on at once. "Such, gentlemen, in short, is my method. I have kept bees about twenty years. I succeed better on this plan than with any other."