Some recommend a valley or hollow glen, for the convenience of the bees returning home with their loads. At any rate care should be taken that no walls, trees, houses, nor anything else, impede the issuing forth of the bees to their pasturage, nor obstruct their return in right lines to the hives. They should be able to fly off from the resting-boards at an angle of about forty degrees with the plane of the horizon. To those who, residing in towns, may consider it as indispensable to the success of an apiary, that it should be in the _immediate_ vicinity of good pasturage, and be thereby deterred from benefiting and amusing themselves by keeping bees; it may be satisfactory to learn, that the apiary of the celebrated Bonner was situated in a garret, in the centre of Glasgow, where it flourished for several years, and furnished him with the means of making many interesting and valuable observations, which he gave to the world about thirty years ago. CHAPTER III. THE BEE-HOUSE. No one that could afford to purchase bee-boxes, and to construct a bee-house, or to convert to that use some building already constructed, would hesitate, I should think, to give them the preference over common straw-hives and an out-door apiary, whether he looked to ultimate profit or to present convenience and security. Perhaps I cannot give a better notion of what I consider as the most eligible plan of a bee-house, than by describing the construction of my own. The whole building, besides answering the purpose of an apiary, may be made subservient to other uses;--my own serves for storing potatoes. The potatoe-cellar is sunk two thirds of its depth in the earth, and the bee-house is raised upon it, having a couple of steps up to the door. The dimensions of both are seven feet six inches by six feet clear within, which affords room for five colonies. The piles or stories of bee-boxes are placed in the bee-house at somewhat less than two feet apart, so as to make the external entrance to each pile respectively, about a yard asunder.--See the plate which forms the frontispiece of this work. On the inside of the bee-house, the boxes in the upper row stand about table height, those in the lower row, about six inches above the floor. On the outside, the entrances to the upper row are about five feet, the entrances to the lower row about three feet from the ground. The entrances through the wall may be cut in stone, bricks or wood, and should be chamfered away on the outside, leaving the wall at those parts as thin as practicable, and letting the opening correspond in size with the outlets that are sunk in the floor boards to be hereafter described. The potatoe-cellar is built with bricks, the bee-house of timber, lathed and plastered within, and thatched on the outside.