A YEAR AMONG THE BEES. 29 
If there is nothing but sealed brood, and no eggs, I am not 
sure whether they have a queen or not, and it is not safe to 
give them one till I do know, so I give them, from another 
colony, a comb containing eggs and young brood. I make a 
record of giving them this young brood thus : “ May 20, no 
eg g y br,” and in perhaps a week I look to see in what 
condition they are. If I find queen-cells started I am pretty 
sure they have no queen, and I may let them go on and real 
a queen, unless I have one I wish to give them. If it happened 
that they had a virgin queen when the young brood was given 
them, the presence of this brood is supposed to stimulate the 
queen to lay the sooner, and I may hud eggs on this later 
inspection. It may be, however, that I shall find neither 
e<*gs nor queen-cell, in which case I consider it probable that 
they have a queen which has not yet commenced to lay, and 
they are left for examination perhaps a week later. 
This is a good time to salt the ground at and about the 
entrances of the hives, to kill the grass, although too often I 
leave it till it has to be cut with a sickle. Grass growing in 
front of the hive annoys the bees, and that growing at the 
side annoys the operator, especially if the operator is of the 
female persuasion, and the grass is wet with dew or rain. 
In one case I spoke of leaving a hive to be examined a week 
later. It is not possible to remember always what is to be 
done, if as many as SO colonies are kept; so, in the back of 
my record-book, I keep a memorandum of work to be done, 
using arbitrary characters to indicate the particular work 
required. A bit of the memorandum may be this : 
June 13, Mon. 4, 93, 17, 84, 79, 
o y cl 1 — • i 
June 14, Tues. 172, 184, 139, 148, 
- A N “ 
In plain English this means that on Monday, June 13, lam 
to look at No. 4, to see if there are any eggs there ; give a 
frame containing young brood to No. 93; clip the wing of 
the queen of 17, which I probably failed to find on a previous 
