enness.

"Number Four Frame! That was your mother's pet comb once," whispered
Melissa to the Princess. "Many's the good egg I've watched her lay
there."

"Aren't you confusing pod hoc with propter hoc?" said the Bee Master.
"Wax-moth only succeed when weak bees let them in." A third frame
crackled and rose into the light. "All this is full of laying workers'
brood. That never happens till the stock's weakened. Phew!"

He beat it on his knee like a tambourine, and it also crumbled to
pieces.

The little swarm shivered as they watched the dwarf drone-grubs squirm
feebly on the grass. Many sound bees had nursed on that frame, well
knowing their work was useless; but the actual sight of even useless
work destroyed disheartens a good worker.

"No, they have some recuperative power left," said the second voice.
"Here's a Queen cell!"

"But it's tucked away among--What on earth has come to the little
wretches? They seem to have lost the instinct of cell-building." The
father held up the frame where the bees had experimented in circular
cell-work. It looked like the pitted head, of a decaying toadstool.

"Not altogether," the son corrected. "There's one line, at least, of
perfectly good cells."

"My work," said Sacharissa to herself. "I'm glad Man does me justice
before--"

That frame, too, was smashed out and thrown atop of the others and the
foul earwiggy quilts.

As frame after frame followed it, the swarm beheld the upheaval,
exposure, and destruction of all that had been well or ill done in every
cranny of their Hive for generations past. There was black comb so old
that they had forgotten where it hung; orange, buff, and ochre-varnished
store-comb, built as bees were used to build before the days of
artificial foundations; and there was a little, white, frail new work.
There were sheets on sheets of level, even brood-comb that had held in
its time unnumbered thousands of unnamed workers; patches of obsolete
drone-comb, broad and high-shouldered, showing to what marks the male
grub was expected to grow; and two-inch deep honey-magazines, empty, but
still magnificent, the whole gummed and glued into twisted scrap-work,
awry on the wires; half-cells, beginnings abandoned, or grandiose,
weak-walled, composite cells pieced out with rubbish and capped with
dirt.

Good or bad, every inch of it was so riddled by the tunnels of the
Wax-moth that it broke in clouds of dust as it was flung on the heap.

"Oh, see!" c