66 A Modern Bee-Farm 
of adult workers. This is the hive which will give the 
heavy surplus, and the other can never compete with it, 
even though it has twice the population. Of course 
excessive (too late) breeding can be to a certain extent 
modified by contracting the size of the brood nest, but 
nevertheless the actual hardy working force will not be in 
excess until the season is far advanced. 
We must now consider the causes of such a wide 
difference. They ‘are many, one of the first being that 
the queen may be stimulated to breed too late in the 
autumn; consequently she will be late to begin breeding 
the following season. The hive may have been short of 
stores, or the combs so overloaded in early spring that 
there was really no chance for the bees to develop the 
brood nest. Perhaps they were thrown back by being too 
much exposed, instead of having warm material above 
them. In either case an early hatching of young bees 
would be out of the question ; and these are the mainstay, 
compensating for the loss of many veterans when frequent 
flights become necessary. Consequently the best powers 
of the queen are not expended before the season opens. 
i 
To obtain good Stock, 
it is absolutely necessary that one keep only the very best 
queens—young, highly prolific and well developed. When 
I mention young, I mean just what I say. How wasteful 
and unnecessary ! you say; but I assert as a fact that to 
enable one to keep his stock generally in the highest state 
of efficiency, he must iretain no queens that have seen 
their second summer. Take a queen raised even so late 
as August; she will be in full profit the following season: 
keep her till another season and her colony will be hardly 
second-rate. This is, of course, if the owner knows how to 
use her powers. 
