rex 



1S95 



THE BEE-KEEPERS' REVIEW. 



employed for feeding back no point is more 

 important than that those should be chosen 

 that enter willingly upon work in the supers. 

 The Italian race is very defective in this re- 

 spect, while the black or German race or 

 crosses in which black brood predominates 

 are superior, though even among these judi- 

 cious selections may be made with great 

 advantage. 



2. The character of the queen. The per- 

 tinent point here is that the queen should 

 be prolific, not that prolificness is specially 

 necessary after the feeding has begun, but 

 unless she is so the colony will not have the 

 numerical strength desirable, and the exist- 

 ing brood will not be great enough in 

 amount to furnish the required reinforce- 

 ments as the work progresses and the old- 

 er bees perish. 



3. The season. That must be early— the 

 earlier the better after the advent of sum- 

 mer weather. In selecting this time we gain 

 in two ways ; first we avoid as far as possible 

 the disposition of the bees to store honey in 

 the brood chamber, a disposition which ever 

 increases as the season wanes, and, second, 

 we secure the great advantage of having the 

 work done during the hottest weather dur- 

 ing which alone bees produce wax and 

 build comb most economically. Of course 

 the work must not be undertaken while 

 honey is being gathered from the fields. 

 The opportune time is the interim between 

 the early summer and the late honey season 

 which begins generally about the 20th of 

 July at the failure of the basswood bloom. 



4. The size and condition of the brood 

 chamber. For obvious reasons this should 



honey where it is of less value than it was 

 before it was fed. The capacity of five 

 Langstroth frames is about right, or of 

 one section of the Heddon hive, and this 

 latter is better because this hive is so shallow 

 that that amount of comb occupies a space 

 equal horizontally to that occupied by the 

 sections in a section case, so that the heat 

 and odor rise equally from the brood cham- 

 ber to all parts of the section case. This is 

 an advantage especially if there should be 

 cool weather before the feeding is finished. 

 The combs used should be such as are filled 

 with brood so far possible and the residue 

 with honey, thus the bees are prevented 

 as far as possible from using or storing the 

 honey so as to entail a loss. 



.'). The condition of the sections to be fill- 

 ed should be considered. The farther the 

 comb in them is worked out, the more hon- 

 ey they contain when they are given to the 

 bees to be completed, the greater will be 

 relative profit. ( >n the other hand, the less 

 they contain and the less the work done up- 

 on them the less the profit, if, indeed, it 

 does not pass the vanishing point. The 

 liberal feeding contemplated will turn a 

 great army of quiet bees into active laborers 

 and will induce the rearing of increased 

 amounts of brood, and growing brood and 

 active laborers require a large amount of 

 food — we don't know how large but proba- 

 bly more than one would guess, so the econ- 

 omy is seen of aiding the bees so far as we 

 can by giving them the best possible comb 

 to fill, as in other ways, so that the work they 

 have to do may be finished at the earliest 

 possible moment that the wages they exact 



be small, because, otherwise, an opportunity 

 is furnished for the production of a large 

 amount of brood whose value beyond a 

 certain limit cannot be great and whose 

 production must cost the consumption of 

 an indefinitely large amount of the honey 

 fed, and also because, otherwise, room is 

 given for the storage of a large amount of 



in the shape of food may be stopped. The 

 matter of the amount of honey required for 

 food while the bees are in a state of activity, 

 and for the production of the wax needed to 

 carry the work to completion is one of very 

 great importance as may be seen from the 

 details of the results of an experiment 

 which are given in the accompanying table. 



