THE BEE'S YEAR 141 



excess of requirements. Just as at the turn of the 

 year, her first thought is to increase progeny, so a still 

 greater prosperity runs to a still greater increase, 

 adding to the hordes of workers the luxury of drones 

 and young queens. Just when the bee-master expects 

 his populous hives to gather far more honey than they 

 can possibly consume, the bees come swarming out 

 almost to the last one, abandon all their stores, and go 

 off to begin life anew from the first gramme of wax. 

 The issue of a swarm from a hive marked for honey- 

 getting proclaims /n> tanto the bee-man's failure. He 

 has his means of dealing with it either by prevention 

 or remedy, but, perchance, he sells the swarm to a 

 beginner in bee-craft, and there the tale of the hive 

 begins at the very beginning. 



In old days, the work of a newly hived swarm was 

 a very laborious affair. It is always attacked with an 

 amount of energy that is astonishing even by com- 

 parison with the bee's normal industry. We save the 

 swarm almost a season's work by giving it frames of 

 wax sheet on which the cells have been planned with 

 walls containing material enough for their completion 

 to the full depth. If the sheets we give them are ten, 

 and weigh a pound, they are equal to a present of 

 forty pounds of honey. Ten days after swarming a 

 large swarm has a superficies of comb equal to nearly 

 twenty square feet, and containing 50,000 cells fully 

 drawn out, the greater number of them filled with 

 young bees, the rest containing from a drop or two to 

 a full complement of honey. We can now put over 

 them another story also full of comb-foundation, 

 barring out the queen by the insertion of a grille 

 through which her subjects but not she can pass. 



