138 EIGHTEEJfTH ANXUAL REPORT OF THE 



will be struggling along raising brood at a high expense, whereas they 

 should be resting quietly without doing so much work and without 

 generating all that heat. • 



Now you might think that if bees have been neglected and have 

 begun to rear a brood, that you will have a new lot of bees to take their 

 place, and while it is an expense, you will still have a colony. But we 

 have found from an examination of dozens and dozens of colonies 

 that those colonies of bees that die in the winter are the colonies of 

 bees that almost invariably had brood in them before they died, and 

 there is no more expensive thing that a colony of bees does than to 

 rear a brood out of season. 



But here is the important thing: When they do start they start 

 with a bang, if I may so express it. Our bees, as I told you last year, 

 had brood from the 7th to the 11th of April, I don't think any brood 

 had emerged in those colonies up to that time, but they started off 

 with a big lot of brood. The result was that the colony was suddenly 

 greatly increased in strength, able to take care of enough brood to 

 fill twelve Langstroth frames one month later. So that this character- 

 istic of European foul brood in not attacking the very first brood of the 

 year gives us our clue to the use of the methods of getting our colonies 

 of bees strong in time for the very earliest flow that comes along. 



A Member. — Wouldn't you have them breed in September? 



Dr. Phillip^. — Yes, but that is getting ready for the winter. 

 But after the winter period comes on, then I want it to delay as long 

 as possible, keep them from breeding as long as possible, say until the 

 latter part of March or the first of April. 



A Member. — Don't you consider that more important than any- 

 thing else? 



Dr. Phillips. — September breeding? 



The Member. — Yes. 



Dr. Philliis. — It is important to get young bees to start the 

 winter. 



Now, there are three remedies commonly used for European foul 

 brood, and I want to mention these three in order to' show that they 

 are exactly alike. You wil,l remember that a few years ago Mr. A. W. 

 Alexander, one of the best bee-keepers that we have had for a long 

 time, describetl a method of eradicating what he called black brood, 

 because we had not got to calhng it European foul brood then, and his 

 method was to remove the queen and keep the colony entirely queen- 

 less for a period of twenty-seven days before a new queen was to begin 

 laying, and she was to be a young, vigorous Italian queen, and accord- 

 ing to the recommendations which Mr. Alexander gave, the result 

 would be an entire elimination of European foul brood. A great many 

 people tried it, and it did not eliminate it. There was more criticism, 

 I think, of the Alexander method of treatment than anything that has 

 appeared in the bee literature for many, manj^ years. The thing that 

 stood out in the mind of all of us that read those articles, or that article 

 particularly, was this, the period of queenlessness. We overlooked the 

 fact that Mr. Alexander said in that article that there was not any use 

 of trying to treat a weak colony by this method; you must get the 

 colony strong. We overlooked that. He said it. We overlooked the 



