COMB, 



81 



and I have strong hopes that necessity will with bees as well 

 as men, prove the mother of invention, and lead them to use 

 the wax, as readily as they do the substitutes cffered them 

 for pollen. (See Chapter on Pollen.) 



If this conjecture should be verified by actual results, it 

 would exert a most powerful influence in the cheap and 

 rapid multiplication of colonies, and would enable the bees to 

 store up most prodigious' quantities of honey. A pound of 

 bees wax might then be made to store up twenty pounds of 

 honey, and the gain to the bee keeper would be the differ- 

 ence in price between the pound of wax, and the twenty 

 pounds of honey, which the bees would have consumed in 

 making the same amount of comb. Strong stocks might thus 

 during the dull season, when no honey can be procured, be 

 most profitably employed in building spare comb, to be used 

 in strengthening feeble stocks, and for a great variety of 

 purposes. Give me the means of cheaply obtaining large 

 amounts of comb, and I have almost found the philosopher's 

 stone in bee keeping. 



The building of comb is carried on with the greatest 

 activity in the night, while the honey is gathered by day. 

 Thus no time is lost. If the weather is too forbidding to 

 allow the bees to go abroad, the combs are very rapidly 

 constructed, as the labor is carried on both by day and by 

 night. On the return of a fair day, the bees gather unusual 

 quantities of honey, as they have plenty of room for its 

 storage. Thus it often happens, that by their wise economy 

 of time, they actually lose nothing, even if confined, for 

 several days, to their hive. 



" How doth tlie little busy bee, improve each shining hour !" 



The poet might with equal truth have described her, as 

 improving the gloomy days, and the da'rk nights, in her use- 

 ful labors. 



