If, after supering, the weather should be unfavourable for the bees to gather food, artificial feeding will have to be resorted to. Should the scheme be carried out early in the year and the queen be prolific, it may be found necessary to repeat it to prevent swarming. It is necessary to remember that inasmuch as the rearing of young queens and the consequent swarming is not carried on under this method, it is a necessity that _the hives should be re-queened every two years_. =Queen Rearing.=--It is better to retain one hive for queen-rearing purposes and this should contain the very best queen available so as to secure a good strain of workers. The drones, too, should be selected by allowing no drone cells in any but the best hives. For the small bee-keeper who cannot spare much time among his bees, and who only requires half a dozen queens in a year, I would recommend that queen-rearing should be worked in with the standard-frame super method described in the earlier part of this chapter. If this course be adopted the procedure is as follows. The hive should be allowed to come to swarming-point in order that queen cells maybe formed by the bees. These should contain eggs or larvæ before the frames are transferred to the super, and all eggs or larvæ should be of the same age. This is an important point, for should one be hatched earlier than the others it will promptly destroy all the other queen eggs or larvae in the frame. The wisest plan is to destroy all queen cells that are capped and the ages of eggs or larvæ noted in accordance with the information given on this point on page 13. In working this method of queen-rearing, _the frames must not be shaken_, but the bees brushed off into the hive, otherwise the contents of the queen cells will be displaced. The zinc excluder, of course, must be thoroughly applied to prevent the queen obtaining access to the super. The super can be left until the day previous to that on which the first young queen is due to leave the cell. It must then be removed, with all the bees in it, and it should either be split up or each queen caged in its cell. After the super is split up, the bee-keeper should try to procure a swarm to divide amongst each part of the super--first running it through a queen excluder to catch the queen. These divisions should be given a separate hive if possible, but if it is necessary that they should occupy one large hive care must be taken thoroughly to separate each section and to have the entrances as far apart as possible. It is advisable, too, that the entrances should be of a different colour to ensure the young queens entering their own section, for should they by chance enter another a battle is sure to ensue with fatal results.