Other conditions being equal, those colonies having the most honey stored compactly in the brood apartment and close about the very center where the last brood of young bees should emerge, are the ones which will winter best. Forty pounds for a northern latitude and 30 in the middle sections of the Tinted States may be considered only a good supply. When natural stores are found to be lacking in the brood chamber, the best substitute is a sirup made of granulated sugar, which should be fed early in the autumn as rapidly as the bees can manipulate it and store it away. If given slowly the bees will be incited to rear brood unseasonably, and will consume much of the food in this way. If several pounds be given at a time--placed in the top story of the colony to be fed, just at nightfall--it will be stored away quickly, so that in a week at most the full winter stores will be completed. The bees will seal it over better if fed slowly at the last; that is, after the main feeding. Sirup made by percolation of cold water through a mass of sugar and then through some porous material, as cotton, is what is called a completely saturated solution; that is, it contains all the sugar the water can be made to hold, and will not trouble by granulation (fig. 71). The same difficulty is avoided by adding well-ripened honey to moderately thick sirup, about one-fourth or one-fifth as much honey as sirup. Molasses, brown sugar, glucose, etc., are not suitable for winter stores for bees. [Illustration: Fig. 72.--The American straw hive of Hayek Bros.] [Illustration: Fig. 73.--Davis hive with newspapers packed between inner and outer cases, and brood frames on end for the winter. (Original.)] It is poor policy to permit bees to enter winter quarters without an abundance of stores--better twice the amount that will be actually consumed than merely enough to enable them to live through.