SPREADING BROOD 
771 
yield an amber-colored honey of good qual¬ 
ity, which granulates quickly. Carloads of 
spikeweed honey have been shipped from 
Fresno County, California. Jepson de¬ 
scribes spikeweed as “abundant on the 
plains of the lower San Joaquin, southward 
to southern California and westward to 
Walnut Creek and Alameda. On the alka¬ 
line plains of the upper San Joaquin this 
species covers tens of thousands of acres, 
and often forms thickets 4 or 5 feet high. 
It is also abundant in more or less alka¬ 
line land on the plains of Solano County, 
and forms extensive colonies in summer 
fields. It is a valued bee plant. 
SPRAYING FRUIT TREES. — See 
Fruit Blossoms. 
SPRAYING DESTRUCTIVE TO THE 
BROOD.—See Fruit Blossoms. 
SPREADING BROOD.—As is very well 
known, queens are inclined to lay their 
eggs in circles in the comb, the circle being 
larger in the center combs and smaller in 
the outside ones. The whole bulk of eggs 
and brood in several combs thus forms 
practically a sphere which the bees are 
able to cover and keep warm. When the 
queen has formed this sphere of brood and 
eggs she curtails her egg-laying for the 
time being until enough brood emerges 
to increase the size of the cluster, when 
she will gradually enlarge the circles of 
brood to keep pace with the enlarged ball 
of bees. 
Yet the queen very often is overcareful 
—that is, she errs on the safe side, so that 
when warm weather has fully set in she 
sometimes lays fewer eggs than she should 
in the judgment of the apiarist, and ac¬ 
cordingly he inserts a frame of empty 
comb in the center of the brood-nest. In 
this comb the queen may commence laying 
at once to unite, as it were, the two halves 
of brood. More often she does not. In 
that case more harm than good has been 
done. If the queen does fill the first one 
given she will be likely, if the weather is 
not cold, to go into the second comb and fill 
it with eggs on both sides; for nice, clean 
empty cells are very tempting to her. In 
a word, this operation of inserting empty 
combs in the center of the brood-nest is 
called “spreading brood,” its object being 
to increase the amount of brood, and thus 
insure a larger force of workers for the 
prospective harvest. 
While this spreading of the brood may 
be performed by experienced beekeepers 
because its stimulates the queens to greater 
egg-laying activity, yet when practiced by 
beginners and the inexperienced it gener¬ 
ally results in much more harm than good 
as already stated. A beginner without pre¬ 
vious experience might, on a warm day in 
early spring, think it high time to put 
empty comb in the center of the brood- 
nest. The queen immediately occupies it, 
filling it with eggs. This, of course, re¬ 
quires a large force of nurse-bees to take 
care of the young bees and hatching larvie. 
A cool spell of weather is almost sure to 
come on, with the result that the cluster 
of bees is contracted, leaving the brood that 
was forced outside, out in the cold, where 
it chills and dies. The outside edge of the 
cluster, in its effort to take care of this 
brood, is likewise chilled, and the colony 
suffers a check and setback far worse than 
had it been left to its own devices. 
Ordinarily the spreading of brood can 
be practiced safely only after settled warm 
weather has arrived. The beginner who 
desires to give extra combs for egg-laying, 
especially in the early spring, would do well 
to put those extra combs at the outside; 
but after settled warm weather has come, 
when the temperature does not go below 60 
degrees Fahrenheit at night at any time, 
he may insert a frame of empty comb at 
the center of the brood-nest. 
It should be borne in mind that the prac¬ 
tice of spreading brood has been largely 
abandoned, even by experienced beekeep¬ 
ers. When the queen has plenty of room 
somewhere in the brood-nest (and that 
“somewhere” should be outside the brood- 
cluster), both bees and queen will ordi¬ 
narily rear as much brood as they can 
safely and profitably care for. 
SPRING DWINDLING.—This is a mal¬ 
ady confined to bees outdoors or those just 
set out of the cellar, and appears only in 
spring—hence the name. It was once sup¬ 
posed to be a disease; but it has now been 
definitely determined to be only the nat¬ 
ural result of a severe winter on a colony 
too weak or a normal one not protected to 
stand the cold. Gradually the individual 
