190 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
of a long obsolete habit in bee-life, a workable 
theory at once suggests itself. Under primeval 
conditions the continued life of the mother-colony 
may have been unnecessary. Its purpose may 
have been fully served when a number of young 
queens and drones had been raised, and the whole 
had swarmed out together, each to form a new 
settlement. It must be remembered that the 
bee-hive, persisting indefinitely from year to year, 
is really quite a modern creation, and became 
practicable only with the invention of the movable 
comb-frame, which allowed the bee-master to effect 
the renewal of combs. It has been seen that the 
brood-combs get gradually choked up with the 
pupa-cocoons, which each bee leaves behind it. 
These webs are so incredibly thin that a dozen of 
them make little appreciable difference to the 
capacity of the cell, and combs have been known 
to remain in use for brood-raising as long as 
twenty years. But eventually they must become 
useless; and then, as bees do not, or cannot, 
remove old combs to make way for new, the com- 
munity must leave for a new home, or gradually 
die out. Thus the age of the old hives was 
definitely limited. 
Modern beemanship has wrought many other 
changes in the life of the honey-bee in addition to 
creating the permanent hive-city. The number 
of bees in a single strong stock, housed in a modern 
frame hive, is probably three times as great as that 
