7. It is necessary to requeen toward the end of your last surplus honey flow for two reasons: First, it is seldom feasible to do so in spring before the honey flow in any locality where the season is short. Second, you requeen with the least disturbance to the colony in late summer and the young queen has time to lay a considerable number of eggs before settled cold weather. It is absolutely necessary to successful wintering that there be a large proportion of quite youngs bees in the hive at the time cold weather prevents further colony activities. Old queens cannot be depended upon to raise enough young bees in the fall of the year. That too is why we do not recommend for honey production that any queen be retained beyond the second season. Many colonies! that are lost during winter leaving honey in the hive, die for lack of a sufficient number of young bees in the colony at the beginning of cold weather.

8. You will see from this explanation why we recommend the leaving of two hive bodies for each colony of bees where they are to be wintered outdoors. One of these bodies is practically necessary for the fall production of enough bees to winter successfully and the other body or a shallow super is necessary for the storage of enough honey for adequate winter stores. In the case where the colony is wintered in the cellar it is always necessary to insure that there is sufficient honey in each of the single hive bodies before the colonies are taken into the cellar. To insure this may require either feeding or the giving of drawn combs of honey. The fact that the colony wintered in the cellar has only one hive body and that this is required for late summer and early spring production of baby bees, shows why it is advisable to store away an additional supply of honey for each cellar wintered colony, to be given to them in spring.

9. Now that you 'have united and requeened all colonies you come to the problem of determining what is an ample amount of stores of honey per hive. There must be enough to insure successful management of bees in your locality from the end of the honey flows one year, to the beginning of warm weather honey flows the next year. Many of us have come to improperly speak of a sufficient supply of honey to successfully winter bees. The greater amount of honey that is consumed by any colony of bees during the winter, is due to insufficient protection against low temperature, wind, and moisture. Honey, properly conserved in winter, will quickly be turned into thousands of baby bees early the next spring, so the colony could be brought up to its highest peak in numbers of bees just before the first main honey flow in your territory. Therefore it is important to leave enough stores with them so that they may not only live through the winter, but to have an adequate supply of honey in the hive for feeding baby bees in the early cold days of the succeeding spring. At the time when honey flowers are in bloom the next spring weather conditions may be so unfavorable that the bee colony loses in numbers faster than it gains in attempting to work under such unfavorable conditions. Therefore, while we have come to think that you leave honey with your bees for wintering, in reality you leave it for the far more important "springing."

10. It has been determined that in most Northern localities a colony of bees will consume not less than 90 pounds of honey as food from the end of the late summer honey flow to the beginning of the next summer honey flow. They obtain some of that from the fields but if you leave less than half of that for your bees you are gambling upon the weather that the bees can work safely in. during the early blooming of honey flowers the next spring. It never pays to gamble.

11. Therefore we recommend that no colony of bees should be left outdoors over winter and spring, even under the most favorable conditions and protection, with less than 50 pounds of honey on the hive in the form of sealed stores. On colonies that are to be wintered in the cellar, we also recommend that each hive should have the equivalent of 50 pounds of sealed stores, at least 30 pounds of that in the single hive body used for cellar wintering and the other 20 pounds in the form of sealed stores put away in the honey house ready to give each colony the next spring. If you will follow this rule you will seldom have cause to regret it. If you have never tried it, you will be surprised at the results. In most localities in the south we have found the successful beekeepers could not leave this quantity of stores on the hive during the winter, because the bees would breed up out of season in that warm climate. Later investigations by the U. S. Bee Culture Laboratory indicate the necessity of ample pollen in the winter brood nest as well as honey. Colonies that build up slowly in spring seem invariably to be those with insufficient pollen carried over, when cold weather prevents gathering pollen in early spring.

12. Many are confronted with the difficulty of satisfying themselves that there is that quantity of honey in the hive. Some beekeepers resort to weighing a hive with only combs in it of the size and style they use and then weighing each hive that contains bees and honey, and subtracting the two weights in order, making an allowance of 5 to 8 pounds for the weight of bees, to determine the amount of honey there. However, we believe that the beekeeper is safe in assuming that each frame well filled with at least two thirds of it containing well sealed honey, should contain at least 5 pounds of honey net, if but little pollen is in the combs. This is conservative and will enable you to play safe. We do recommend the wintering of bees on brood frames of Hoffman or Modified Dadant depth.