DADANT SYSTEM OF BEEKEEPING 



sufficiently prolific, we will ascertain that many queens can and do 

 lay 3,500 and even more eggs per day, for a number of weeks. 

 To count the number of cells it is only necessary to measure the 

 number of square inches of brood surface, remembering that 

 each square inch represents between 27 and 28 workers. 



This heavy brood laying lasts only during the spring and 

 early summer months, of course. In the fall the laying is 

 reduced and in the winter it ceases. 



It is important that we should enable the queen to lay 

 to the utmost of her capacity for the time when her bees, or the 

 bees hatching from her eggs, will be able to harvest a crop. 

 Like a good general, we must marshal our forces for the battle 

 neither too early, nor too late. With bees, it is more important 

 than with men, because bees have but a very limited time of 

 usefulness. In order to illustrate this, it is necessary to say a 

 few words about the 



Worker-Bee 



The worker-bee is an undeveloped female. Had the young 

 female larva, when hatching, been fed with milky pap during the 



whole time of her existence 

 as larva, and had she been 

 placed in a spacious queen- 

 cell, she would have been a 

 queen. But only one queen 

 is needed in a hive. So 

 the female larvae, and the 

 drone larvae as well, are 

 hatched in small cells and 

 fed with the milky pap, or 

 royal jelly, during only the 

 first three days of life; after 

 that time, the food is coarser 

 and composed of pollen, or 

 bee-bread as it is often called, and honey. The result is an 

 entirely different being from what it would have been as a 

 fully developed insect : 



Fig. 5. 



Head of the worker bee 

 (magnified) 



