82 COMB. 



these parings of wax. Whether " nature abhors a vacuum," 

 or not, bees certainly do, when it occurs among the combs 

 of their main hive. They will not consume the honey stored 

 up for winter use to replace the combs taken from them ; 

 they can gather none from the flowers ; 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 offered them for pollen. 



If this conjecture should be verified by actual results, it 

 would promote the cheap and rapid multiplication of colonies, 

 besides enabling the bees to amass unusual quantities of 

 honey., A pound of bees wax might then be made to store 

 up nearly twenty of honey, and the gain to the bee-keeper 

 would be the great difference in price between the pound of 

 wax, and the honey which bees consume in making the same 

 weight of comb. Strong stocks might thus during the dull 

 season, when no honey can be procured, be profitably em- 

 ployed 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 quantities 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 by night, while the honey is gathered by day.t 

 Thus no time is lost. When the weather is so forbidding as 

 to prevent the bees from going abroad, the combs are very 

 rapidly constructed, the labor being carried on both by day 

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



* I have ascertained that bees will use fine shavings of wax to build 

 new comb; but further investigations are needed, to make the dis- 

 covery of practical advantage to the great mass of bee-keepers. 



1 1 have known bees to gather honey from the tulip tree, on very 

 clear moonlight nights. 



