With such great variation in colony development and behavior due to regional differences, it is not surprising that beekeepers have worked out rule-of-thumb methods that work well enough in one locality under most conditions. However, the use of rule-of-thumb methods accounts for the frequent failure of a beekeeper to secure a crop when he moves to a new locality. There is great need for an understanding of beekeeping principles.

In each region one finds beekeepers insisting that beekeeping is different there from what it is anywhere else, and that to succeed in a new place, one must forget what he had learned elsewhere and learn a new rule-of-thumb method.

It is all too true that those who have always worked in one locality seldom have a comprehensive view of beekeeping. We have usually been taught or have worked out a rule-of-thumb method for our own locality which gives us a satisfying crop of honey, but of the underlying principles which influence bees to act as they do, too many of us have little knowledge. Consequently, when we move to a new locality we resort to learning another rule-of- thumb method. Rule-of-thumb methods are unsatisfactory and we need some scientifically worked out rules of universal application.

With the increase of migratory beekeeping came a demand for a system that would work wherever the operator might have his bees. Migratory beekeepers, too, began to see a similarity in the reactions of bees to the same conditions in widely separated localities.

Although the fundamental principles of beekeeping are simple and easily mastered, commercial beekeeping grows continually more complex, and continual study and thought is required to get from any location all the honey it will pay to get. Almost anyone can put a hundred colonies of bees in a good clover or alfalfa location and in a good season, get a crop of honey that will pay well. It is, however the exceptional man who can get from any locality, the most it will give in a good season and a fair crop in a poor year when his neighbors gel little honey.

A rule-of-thumb method may work in a good or normal season. In a poor or abnormal season it will fail, and then the inefficient beekeeper wonders why his neighbor, who has studied bee behavior and knows his bees and locality has produced a crop of honey. The crop may be smaller than usual, and probably much of it from what were normally, minor sources; but the profitable crop instead of a failure comes because, instead of working by a rule-of-thumb method adapted only to a certain set of conditions, the expert operator has worked according to the response of his bees to their surroundings, in harmony with the fundamental principles of beekeeping.