HONEYCOMB 
489 
Top view of honeycomb greatly enlarged, showing the thick circular rim or coping at,the top of the cell. 
also stored in them; but where they are 
very large, the bees are compelled to turn 
them up, or the honey would flow out. 
As honey is kept in place by capillary 
attraction, when cells exceed a certain size 
the adhesion of the liquid to the wax walls 
is insufficient, of itself, to hold the honey 
in place. Where drones are to be reared in 
these very large cells the bees contract the 
mouth by a thick rim. As an experiment, 
some plates were made for producing 
small sheets of foundation, having only 
3% cells to the inch. The bees worked on 
a few of these, with these same thick rims, 
but they evidently did not like them very 
well, for they tried to make worker-cells 
of some of them, and it proved so much 
of a complication for them that they finally 
abandoned the whole piece of comb, ap¬ 
parently in disgust. Bees sometimes rear 
worker brood in drone comb, where com¬ 
pelled to from want of room, and they 
always do it in the way already mentioned, 
by contracting the mouth of the cells and 
leaving the young bee a rather large berth 
in which to grow and develop. Drones are 
sometimes reared in worker-cells also, but 
they are so much cramped in growth that 
they seldom look like fully developed in¬ 
sects. See Laying Workers; also Brood. 
Several times it has been suggested that 
the race of honeybees could be enlarged by 
giving them larger cells; and some circum¬ 
stances seem to indicate that something 
may be done in this direction, altho there 
is little hope of any permanent enlarge¬ 
ment in size without combining with it the 
idea of selecting the largest bees from 
which to propagate. By making the cells 
smaller than ordinarily, small bees are ob¬ 
tained with very little trouble; and the au¬ 
thor has seen a whole nucleus of bees so 
small as to be really laughable, just be¬ 
cause the comb they emerged from was 
set at an angle so that one side was con¬ 
cave and the other convex. The small 
bees came from the concave side. Their 
light, active movements, as they sported in 
front of the hive, made them a pretty and 
amusing sight for those fond of curiosi- 
