30 
lJEE-CUM'URE. 
Whoever succeeds in securing strong stocks has satisfactory 
results ; whoever keeps weak ones has little but perplexity. 
It is especially important that hives should be very populous 
during the months of May, June and July, when honey is to 
be gathered. The bee-keeper should, therefore, mako every- 
thing bend to the production of large numbers of bees during 
the early part of the season. Strong colonies of bees gen- 
erally commence breeding about the first of January, the 
queen laying a few eggs in the centre of the cluster of bees. 
When she has laid a few in one side of the comb, she goes to 
the other side and lays a few just opposite. She will then 
enlarge the circle of eggs on both sides of the comb, and then • 
proceed to the adjacent combs on each side of where she has 
been laying, and deposit the eggs in the same manner as in 
the first comb. She will then return and enlarge the first 
circlo, and deposit eggs in the empty cells -in the centre; for 
by this time (if twenty-one days have elapsed), young bees 
will begin to have been hatched from them. In this manner 
the bees manage to concentrate their heat on the brood. 
The more numerous the bees the greater number they 
can produce. As soon as they begin to gather honey and 
bee-bread, they commence to breed more rapidly, until at the 
commencement of good honey-gathering they will be hatch- 
ing a thousand or more bees each day ; and if the keeper now 
has a colony of thirty thousand bees, ten thousand may re- 
main in the hive during the day to do in-door work and keep 
the brood warm, whilst the twenty thousand may go abroad 
for stores, and will soon have a good stock of surplus honey, 
and will give off swarms of bees. The case is quite the re- 
verse with weak, starving stocks. It will be the first of 
March before they will commence rearing brood, for they 
would have neither bees to keep it warm nor honey to feod 
it. When they commence collecting honey from fruit trees 
and other early bloom, they will commence rearing a goodly 
number of bees which will require a considerable amount of 
honey. It may then bo two or thre.e weeks before white 
olover appears, and having commenced to rear their brood, 
they will continue to feed and develop it until they have con- 
sumed their small stock of honey. Then if they should bo 
confined to their hives by four or five days cold weather, 
they will all perish. Thousands of colonies of bees, in Ohio, 
perished last season between fruit bloom and white clover. 
