104 THE BLESSED BEES. 



that they would take, and the bees began to fill the 

 empty frame with comb. The combs built in the 

 nuclei, without queens, always have nearly or quite 

 all drone cells, but these combs are just as valuable 

 for use in the second stories. I needed worker 

 combs for the brood chambers, and combs in the 

 second stories to contain surplus honey. For this 

 last purpose the combs made up entirely of drone 

 cells are fully as valuable. Hence I could profit- 

 ably employ every bee, even in the queenless nuclei. 

 Even these nuclei were pretty well supplied with 

 bees, and as they had plenty of honey fed to them 

 every night, their combs made good progress. In 

 six days I gave each of them another empty frame, 

 and by the time theii queens were all laying, they 

 had both frames full of comb. In ten days after 

 putting in the queen cells forty-three of the nuclei 

 had laying queens. Three days later I again exam- 

 ined, and found that the other seventeen were all 

 right. My precautions against the loss of queens 

 had been successful. Not a single queen had failed. 

 The two nuclei, kept in the spring after Italianiz- 

 ing, had gradually been built up into strong stocks, 

 by giving them the frames now and then found con- 

 taining eggs or brood in the upper stories. These 

 two and the other thirty-five had done good work 

 in comb-building, during the time that the young 

 queens were hatching, meeting the drones, and be- 



