The methods of selective breeding, making increase, swarm control, cell getting, queen mating, and requeening, given here are practical procedures for the honey getter and there are but few honey-producing regions where they cannot be combined successfully with the clear brood nest system of management.

The beekeeper who has few colonies can give considerable attention to requeening each one; but he who counts his colonies by the hundreds or thousands must, of necessity, requeen with a minimum of work. Nothing else is humanly possible.

Rearing queens and requeening is, therefore, a serious problem for the commercial honey producer. The type of honey-producing region in which he works will be an important factor in deciding how he shall requeen and how he shall make increase. He may, if his number of colonies is large enough, and his location right, hire a specialist to rear queens for him; he may buy the queens he needs; or he may use a system of management whereby his colonies rear their own queens and make the necessary increase without loss of honey and with a minimum of his own labor.

Some beekeepers successfully omit requeening from their program, except such as they do by the use of package bees. They requeen by buying package bees with queens in the spring to fill all empty hives or to add to all colonies which have become too poor to be profitable under their system of management. Then, when fall comes, these new colonies and the colonies which have been aided with young queens and package bees are united with other colonies that need requeening or that are not otherwise up to standard strength.

The next spring, all the empty equipment is again filled with package bees and any over-wintered colonies showing poor queens are requeened or have package bees with queens added during early spring, as in fruit bloom.

Because so many factors have a bearing on the problem, it will be necessary to consider principles, as in the discussion of the clear brood nest, rather than details, leaving to the individual operator the adaptation of these principles to his own conditions.

As stated in the beginning of this book, the normal bee colony is not the one which produces and stores a large amount of honey, but the one which makes enough honey to live on and then reproduces itself by swarming. In the normal bee colony, requeening takes place when the queen becomes old or is lost by some accident. Removal of the queen by the beekeeper would be such an accident