My Bees 145 



method of making artificial comb and filling it 

 with artificial honey. A dealer in honey said 

 to me one day: "These rascals who adulterate 

 honey with glucose are ruining our business in 

 extracted honey. Fortunately, they cannot 

 imitate comb-honey. It has been tried, but 

 does not succeed; I would give $10,000 to find 

 a good method of doing it." So much for 

 business virtue. The only way in which 

 adulteration comes into play with comb-honey 

 is in the practice of feeding the bees upon 

 glucose or maple-sugar and water, which mix- 

 ture they, of course, store up in the boxes and 

 "cap" over in the usual way, as if it was genu- 

 ine honey from flowers. 



The internal economy of a beehive, with its 

 thousands of workers, its drones, and its one 

 queen, has been described so often in print 

 that I need not waste space upon it. A good 

 beehive, well-filled, contains about 25,000 bees. 

 My first beehive had about 5000 when it came 

 to me, but reached the maximum before the 

 end of the autumn. When the queen lays 

 eggs, she does so at the rate of several hundred 

 a day, and in less than three weeks the bees 



