But sugar-syrup and pea-flour are not natural foods for bees, and there is little doubt that a prolonged course of such diet tends to lower the tone and stamina of the race, and thus may prepare the way for disease. The golden rule in the matter seems to be that artificial feeding should be resorted to only where strength of stocks is necessary, to secure the harvest, or where actual starvation threatens. In purely heather-districts, when the big population is quite early enough if it is to hand in late June, nothing short of imminent starvation should induce the bee-master to give artificial, and therefore unavoidably inferior, food. In sheep-country the same rule holds. Except in the most unfavourable years, a hive, headed by a young and vigorous queen, can be relied upon to get itself into the finest fettle by the time the main crops are ready for exploitation. In this case the beeman has only to make certain from time to time that no stock is in absolute want of the ordinary means of subsistence. But in those warm, favoured regions of the south-west, the lands of the apple-blossom and the heather, where there is a very early and a very late harvest to be gathered, a different system must be pursued. Here we touch on the second grand principle of successful bee-keeping—the necessity for having in all hives only the most prolific mother-bees. For profitable honey-getting a queen should seldom be kept beyond her second year. After that she is usually of little account, and should be superseded, either by the bee-master or the bees. But where a queen has been over-stimulated by feeding to raise an immense population in the spring of the year, she is rarely capable of another supreme effort in the autumn. The best policy, therefore, if the heather-harvest is an important one, is to remove the old queens as soon as the spring work is over, and to substitute for them queens that are in their best season, but at the beginning of their resources instead of at the end. In this way another huge army of workers is soon born to the hive, and the double harvest is secured. [Picture: Hiving a swarm]