60 
THE IIIVE AND IIONEY-BEE. 
for forty-six years ! “ Such cases have led to the erroneou 
opinion, that bees are a long-lived race. But this, as Dr. 
Evans has observed, is just as wise as if a stranger, con- 
templating a populous city, and personally unacquainted 
with its inhabitants, should, on paying it a second visit, 
many years after, and finding it equally populous, imagine 
that it was peopled by the same individuals, not one. of 
whom might then be living. 
1 Like leaves on trees, the race of bees is found, 
Now green in youth, now withering on the ground ; 
Another race the Spring or Full supplies, 
They droop successive, and successive rise.’ ” 
Evans. 
The cocoons spun by the larvae are never removed by 
the bees ; they adhere so closely to the sides of the cells, 
that the labor of removal would cost more than it would 
be worth. As the breeding cells may eventually become 
too small for the proper development of the young, very 
old combs should be removed from the hive. It is a great 
mistake, however, to imagine that the brood-combs ought 
to be changed every year. If it were desirable, this 
might easily be done in my hives ; but to remove them 
oftener than once in five or six years, requires a needless 
consumption of honey to replace them, and injures the 
bees in Winter, as the new comb is much colder than the 
old. 
Inventors of hives have too often been “ men of one 
idea and that one, instead of being a well established 
and important fact in the physiology of the bee, has fre- 
quently (like the necessity for a yearly change of the 
brood-combs), been merely a conceit of some visionary 
projector. This might be harmless enough, were no effort 
made to impose such crudities upon an ignorant public, 
either in the shape of a patented hive, or worse still, of an 
