A wise man once said, "There is no new thing under the sun"; and, "Of the making of books there is no end. " But he did not say that anyone knew all about anything, or that no more-ought to be written; therefore, I am writing some new things about an old subject.

This book, however, is not about the habits of the honeybee nor about the behavior of the bee colony. It concerns those factors in beekeeping which have to do with the getting of honey; and it deals with well-known facts regarding the habits of bees and with the principles underlying the activities of the bee colony only when reference to them is necessary to explain some point of practice.

The behavior and activity of the normal bee colony has as its aim the preservation of colony life and reproduction of the species, the storing of honey being incidental to the existence of the colony; while, on the contrary, the work of the commercial honey producer has, as its purpose, the storing of honey.

For the production of surplus honey, the swarming impulse of the colony must be kept under such control that the activities of the bees are directed towards the continuous storing of honey without swarming.

It is natural for the bee colony to build up to good strength and then to cast a swarm. It is the business of the honey getter to cause his colonies to behave unnaturally, just as the dairyman does when he breeds a milking strain of cows and uses dairy practices to cause each cow to produce much milk instead of just enough for her calf.

The dairyman owes much of his success to his skill in feeding cows. The beekeeper cannot feed his bees a balanced ration for honey production, but must, by apiary management, divert the natural instincts of the bee colony to storing honey instead of swarming.

It is at once evident that control of the swarming instinct is the foundation of successful honey getting. On successful handling of this one factor, aside from disease, location, and seasonal variations, success as a honey getter depends.

It is evident, also, to the student of bees, that the behavior of the colony in regard to swarming depends primarily on the queen; therefore, to control swarming, the activity of the queen must be under control. On this one principle are founded the practices which modern beekeepers use in successful honey getting.

To have control of the queen, and, therefore, of the activities of the colony, the honey getter must know accurately, at all times, the condition of his colonies and the direction their activities are taking. Because the life cycle of a bee is as it is, the operator must know, at intervals of 8 or 10 days (whether or not he works every colony so frequently), what changes, if any, are taking place in the activities and development of each colony of bees under his care.

Examining the brood nest of every colony as frequently as every 8 or 10 days means a great amount of work; therefore, the expert honey getter develops a plan of apiary management which requires a minimum of brood nest examinations.

A successful operator will work out for himself, a method of management which gives adequate control of colony activity with the least labor.

Such an operator must have an intimate knowledge, not only of bee habits and natural colony behavior, but of the effect of various beekeeping practices on colony activity.

He must also know the nectar-producing possibilities of his locations and the effects of varying seasonal conditions.

Beekeeping in the United States developed earliest, and extensively, in the white clover region. Therefore, most of the literature deals with methods useful in that territory and gives little attention to practices in other and more recently developed regions in which the combinations of factors to which bees react are decidedly different.

It is well known that bees, as far as we can understand them, always react in the same way to the same conditions. The difficulty is to determine when the conditions are the same. If the beekeeper works two apparently similar colonies in the same way and one reacts in the way he expected while the other does not, it is evident that he erred in judgment or in practice with one colony.

Investigations into beekeeping economics and apiary management indicate that all systems of management for honey getting, however diverse they appear to be, have certain factors in common.

It is also evident that the labor used in getting honey is an important factor in its cost, varying from more than half the gross cost in smaller apiaries to slightly more than one-third in the larger businesses.

One who keeps bees for research study or merely as a hobby, may spend as much time as he wishes in caring for them and studying their behavior; but the apiarist who makes a living by getting honey must study labor costs and cut them wherever possible.

The labor used by different operators during a year varies from as little as 2 hours to as much as 8 hours per colony.

In territories where nectar production is good, the cost of getting honey can be reduced and income increased by reducing the labor per colony and keeping more colonies. If a beekeeper has 300 colonies on which his labor during the year is 6 2/3 hours per colony, or 2,000 hours, he can keep 1, 000 colonies with the same amount of labor if he reduces his labor to 2 hours per colony. This would make his gross income 3 1/3 times as great. If his 300 hives produced $1, 200, his 1,000 hives would produce $4,000.

These figures are given to illustrate the importance of labor in the cost of getting honey. The beekeeper who would produce honey profitably must largely replace man-labor with bee-labor.

Once upon a time I was told that I had made a wonderful speech on beekeeping. At five minutes' notice I had to condense into 15 minutes a talk an hour and a half long. I was thoroughly dissatisfied, myself, with the speech because I had to state facts without qualification or explanation as to reasons or exceptions, and while I had told the truth, I knew that I had not told the whole truth and that my talk could be picked full of holes by any good beekeeper.

In this book, I have given some important facts in few words-bare statements, and these will be printed in italics so that you can read quickly and get the gist of a page in a minute. Then follows what seems to me to be the necessary discussion for the student who wishes to know the reasons for the statements in italics.

This book is primarily for operators of apiary businesses and students of beekeeping who know the possibilities of their locations and who already have a good knowledge of beekeeping principles and practices. But it will also be of use to the beginner and will help him to shorten his experimental period by directing his attention to certain factors and practices which form the basis of all plans of apiary management for honey production.

My purpose is to classify systems of management, to list the principal factors involved in honey production, and to determine the beekeeping practices which will provide those basic factors, so that each beekeeper may work out for himself a system, suited to his locations and conditions, for getting honey and preparing it for market with the least expenditure for labor and at the lowest cost.

Some operators prefer a system which makes the individual colony the unit, while others prefer to consider a whole apiary the unit of management. These latter expect to get a moderate per colony yield with a minimum of labor, and to use, in caring for another apiary, the labor that might otherwise be expended in securing a larger per colony yield from fewer colonies.

Because this book is not a discussion just for beginners, it does not, primarily, go into bee behavior, but considers practices and methods which insure the adequate presence and maintenance of the basic factors for honey getting, leaving it to the reader to correlate these practices and methods with the principles of bee behavior and with his local conditions. For this purpose, however, this book alone is not sufficient but must be studied in connection with standard text books on the honey bee and with current literature of the industry. Only by such study, combined with practice, may the beginner become a bee master and a successful honey getter.

See Bibliography in Appendix.