90 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 
““Tt was a great day,”’ he said, reflectively, “a 
great day for bee-keeping when foundation was 
invented. The bee-man who lets his hives work on 
the old obsolete natural system nowadays makes a 
hopeless handicap of things. Yet the saving of 
time and bee-labour is not the only, and is hardly 
the most important, outcome of the use of founda- 
tion. It has done a great deal more than that, for 
it has solved the very weighty problem of how to 
keep the number of drones in a hive within 
reasonable limits.” 
He opened the door of a small side-room. From 
ceiling to floor the walls were covered with deep 
racks loaded with frames of empty comb, ll 
ready for next season. Taking down a couple 
of the frames, he brought them out into the 
light. 
‘‘ These will explain to you what I mean,” said 
he. ‘‘ This first one is a natural-built comb, made 
without the milled foundation. The centre and 
upper part, you see, is covered on both sides with 
the small cells of the worker-brood. But all the 
rest of the frame is filled with larger cells, and in 
these only drones are bred. Bees, if left to them- 
selves, will always rear a great many more drones 
than are needed; and as the drones gather no stores 
but only consume them in large quantities, a super- 
abundance of the male-bees in a hive must mean a 
diminished honey-yield. But the use of foundation 
has changed all that. Now look at this other 
frame. By filling all brood-frames with worker- 
foundation, as has been done here, we compel the 
bees to make only small cells, in which the rearing 
of drones is almost impossible; and so we keep 
“ce 
, 
1 
