Emergencies will occur needing heroic treatment, but the beekeeper with mind and hand trained by experience and thoughtful consideration of his “specialty,” will rise superior to any occasion, and when discouragement comes, as it inevitably will, in the words of the immortal Longfellow, “He will look not mournfully into the past, it comes not back again, but wisely improve the future for it is his.”
Pleasure and profit go hand in hand, as a rule, in this specialty, although the former is not unalloyed by a liberal application of the “business end” of the little busy bee, and the latter by a recurrence of poor honey seasons. In nature are found both the beautiful and the sublime; in the hive both are constantly under the beekeeper’s eye, teaching him to look with amazement from “nature up to nature’s God.” As he views his hive and sees the city grow, and population increase, the waxen walls, and stores well filled, the free-born citizen hurrying to and fro, each with his special task, outside of the thoughts of profit will come to the most unimpressionable, thoughts of wonder and admiration for the works of that great Architect of the universe who said, “Let there be life and there was life.”
The profits of beekeeping are what? To many a one they hold out the hopes of “the glorious privilege of being independent;” and to obtain these profits the specialist, gifted with the requisite mental and physical qualities, must be “the right man in the right place.” He must have hives of the movable-frame order. Moses Quinby wrote thus, in 1858: “There is not the least doubt, in my mind, that whoever realizes the greatest profit from his bees will have to retain the movable combs in some form;” and who of us will gainsay this to-day? Out of the many styles of movable-comb hives now in existence, the beekeeper will select one best fitted for the business in which he means to engage, be it the production of comb or extracted honey, queen-rearing, bee-selling, or a combination of all.
The specialist who intends to rear bees for sale will do well to employ that hive which will take the size and style of frame most in use in the district in which he resides. Interchangeability of parts is a grand secret of success, and the beekeeper who can sell a colony of bees, or buy a colony well knowing that each and every frame is usable in his own or his neighbors’ hives, has made a step in the right direction. The main points in a good hive are, “Simplicity of construction, combining plenty of bee-space with perfect ease of manipulation.”