2 BULLETIN 1349, U. S. DEPAETMEXT OF AGRICULTTJIiE 
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 top 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, f> 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 
(18, p. 475) 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 
