2 BULLETIN 1349, TJ. S. DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE 



occur about three weeks in advance of the main honey flow; in other 

 words, the queen should reach her maximum daily egg-laying rate 

 during the period six weeks prior to the honey flow. Since in a colony 

 left to itself such is usually not the case, a correct understanding of 

 the principles governing brood rearing throughout the year becomes 

 of prime importance to the beekeeper, if he is to handle his colonies 

 in such a way as to secure a maximum honey crop. 



Lack of knowledge of the principles governing brood rearing may 

 cause a reduction in the honey crop by bringing about in a colony any 

 or all of the three following possibilities : 



1. The population of the colony may not become large enough to 

 provide sufficient field bees during nectar flows to gather surplus 

 adequate to give the beekeeper a fair return for time spent and 

 capital invested. 



2. Surplus honey may be consumed in regions of early nectar flows 

 by bees which have emerged too late to serve as nectar gatherers, and 

 too early to winter over or even to assist in building up the colony for 

 winter. 



3. Swarming may be stimulated if the ratio between hive bees 

 and field bees does not remain such as will avoid causing a congestion 

 within the hive whenever one of these classes is relatively idle while 

 the other is extremely busy. 



The prevention of any or all of these states involves such questions 

 as wintering, stores for spring, requeening, population of the colony at 

 the beginning of brood rearing, swarm control, dequeening, removal 

 of brood, and other related factors. In short, regardless of its immedi- 

 ate purpose, every sound beekeeping practice having to do with the 

 actual manipulation of the colony itself has as its final result the eli- 

 mination or prevention of some one of the three above-mentioned 

 conditions. The utility of any manipulation of the colony may well 

 be gauged by the extent to which such an outcome is achieved. It is 

 essential, then, to have a clear understanding of the principles of brood 

 rearing in order to apply the proper procedure to any case so as to 

 obtain the desired result. 



The manner of increase in a colony's population has been under 

 discussion since the days of the ancients. Views on this subject 

 prior to the latter part of the seventeenth century, however, differed 

 widely from those now held, since the sex of the queen had not yet 

 been determined and many people even believed in the spontaneous 

 generation or creation of bees. That brood rearing is a phenomenon 

 in which the queen is concerned directly was not generally recognized 

 until Swammerdam (14, p- 159) 1 in 1669 established clearly the 

 actual relationship borne by the queen to any increase in the colony's 

 population. Since this great apicultural discovery, beekeeping litera- 

 ture has been filled with reports and conjectures as to a queen's 

 daily egg-laying capacity, and the total amount of brood reared 

 during a season. Among early investigators in the field, Reaumur 

 (13, p. 4-75) in 1740 stated that the height of egg laying comes in 

 the spring and that over a period of two months at that time the 

 queen may average 200 eggs per day, this average being accepted 

 for nearly a century afterwards as fairly typical of a queen's egg- 

 laying capacity. 



1 Reference is made by number (italic) to "Literature cited," p. 37 



