CHAPTER IV. 
NA T URA L INCREA SE. 
The Effect of Advancing Spring : Breeding Increased 
— Premonitory Signs of Swarming : Drone-raising ; 
Queen Cells — Excitement of Swarming — Settling 
— Tanging: is it Useless? — Hiving — Fanning and 
Intercommunication — Difficulties in Hiving — Swarm- 
Box and Bag — Scouts — Queen-catching — Wing- 
clipping — Piping — Casts — Plurality of Queens — 
Peculiarities of Casts : Consist of Young Bees ; 
Build Worker Comb — Risks Attending Casts — 
Absconding Swarms. 
Bees, in partial sympathy with sleeping Nature, spend 
the winter in comparative inactivity, and breeding is 
for a period suspended ; but as the sun begins to 
climb the heavens, and the days lengthen, the colony 
is roused, and initial steps are taken to prepare for the 
labour of another summer by stimulating the queen 
to provide eggs. She, moving round and round in 
a spiral upon the cell first furnished, enlarges her 
brood patch, while the dense cluster into which her 
children have been driven by the biting air during 
weary months of waiting, begins to expand, and those 
that have been pressed together for mutual warmth 
