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JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ENTOMOLOGY 
[Vol. 16 
sonal records for fifty-three colonies being now available. In the vicinity of Wash¬ 
ington brood rearing shows three major phases:—1. an abrupt rise from the be¬ 
ginning in March to the maximum peak in May, 2. a pronounced summer decline 
extending from the maximum until early August and 3. a late summer secondary 
peak and subsequent autumn decline. The first is of great importance and the peak 
should be reached three weeks before the honey flow. The second phase or summer 
decline is dependent in its rate upon the amount of incoming nectar or pollen. The 
third or final phase shows the amount of brood which can be cared for in early spring 
and is the one which may spell success or failure for the first phase of the next year. 
There is a direct relation between nectar flow and brood rearing. Prolonged inclem¬ 
ent weather may retard brood rearing in the spring, though this may be overcome 
by strong colonies. A strong colony tends to remain strong. 
The question of what actually takes place in brood-rearing through¬ 
out the active season is one concerning which very little of value has 
been published. It is true that there have been many conjectures and 
many attempts to estimate the ntfmber of eggs a queen is capable of lay¬ 
ing in a single day, but all available records of periodic brood counts 
throughout an entire season may be counted on the fingers of one hand. 
The earliest authentic count of the number of eggs laid by a queen 
in a single day was made in 1856 by von Berlepsch, the German investi¬ 
gator. He managed to confine the egg-laying activity of a certain queen 
to a single comb during twenty-four hours. A count then showed 3021 
eggs. This number has since become classic, having been adopted 
widely as a proper index of a queen’s daily egg-laying capacity. From 
this number von Berlepsch assumed that a queen might be capable of 
laying 1,300,000 eggs during her lifetime. Cheshire (p. 228) thought it 
a mere trifle to add 200,000 to this total, and he gives 1,500,000 as his 
estimate, adding that this is “a number so vast that the eggs, lying in 
contact end to end, would stretch about one and three-quarters miles.” 
Many later attempts to ascertain the daily egg-laying rate have been 
made. Typical of these is that given by Doolittle in Gleanings in Bee 
Culture during 1918. Because he had estimated roughly that a certain 
colony possessed on one occasion sufficient brood to fill completely 
18 to 20 Gallup frames, he concluded that the queen in this particular 
colony had been laying 5,000 eggs daily. 
All such sporadic attempts to find out the daily egg-laying rate are 
highly interesting, of course, but after all they give little aid in any en¬ 
deavor to determine what is going on in the way of brood-rearing through¬ 
out the season. This is all the more true because only too often the work 
has been done for an exceptional queen for a single day at the height of 
the season’s activity. With this point in mind it is readily seen that no 
