Experienced bee-keepers are often able to increase their colonies cheaply in the autumn by _driving_ their neighbour’s bees. Unhappily there are still many owners of bees in this enlightened country to whom the hive is as a sealed book that they have never attempted to open. They do not trouble to look after their bees, and, when wanting the honey, would destroy them to obtain it, if some practical bee-keeper did not come forward and offer to do the work for them, asking to be allowed to take the bees he has saved from destruction in return for his services, a request which the owner is generally willing enough to grant. It requires a man of some little experience to drive bees successfully, so we will not go into the details of the operation here. Suffice it to say that the straw hive or skep from which the bees are to be driven is fixed in an inverted position, and another skep placed over it into which the bees, by repeated rapping, are driven. Driven bees can generally be bought fairly cheaply in the autumn. Several lots of driven bees should be put together into a wooden hive provided with frames fitted with foundation, or better still, ready drawn-out combs if you have them. Rapid feeding must then be commenced at once, and sufficient food for winter stores should be taken down and sealed over before the middle of September. We must not be surprised if our extracted honey becomes opaque and solid on the approach of cold weather. This process is called candying or granulation, and is, in fact, a proof of the purity of the honey, though some kinds granulate much sooner than others. Well-ripened honey, when granulated, will keep good for years. In concluding these papers a few words on the natural history of bees may be of interest. Some of my readers will be surprised when I tell them that there are about two hundred different kinds of bees to be found in England. Up to the present I have been talking only about one of these, and this one, properly speaking, is a honey-bee. Almost all the other bees are solitary in their habits, that is, they do not live in large colonies in hives, but singly or in pairs in holes in the ground, in old stumps or walls, or in the hollow stems of plants. Still they are, many of them, very interesting, and well worth studying. They all feed on honey, and may be found on various kinds of flowers throughout the spring and summer. Some of them are large and beautiful like the well-known humble-bees; others are small and inconspicuous. Some resemble our honey-bee so closely that none but an expert could tell them apart; others again have such a strong likeness to wasps that a novice would scarcely give them credit for sweeter relationships. [Illustration: QUEEN HUMBLE-BEE (_Bombus terrestris_).]