Carl and Bob went to look. The colony was of about one-fourth its normal strength, and the bees, instead of being clustered on the combs, were running and scattering in every direction. Despite the smoke they boiled out of the hive, making a peculiar distressful hum, not easily described.
“Queenless, for certain!” Carl exclaimed, recognizing these indications.
And, indeed, when the combs were taken out one by one there was no sign of either eggs or brood. The queen must have perished in the winter. These bees were all old ones from the last season, and they had no possibility of rearing any young. In a little while longer they would all have died, and they were well aware of their desperate state. They were intensely nervous and fierce-tempered, yet their indomitable instinct for work had led them to keep gathering honey. As they had no brood to feed it to, and adult bees eat little, they had accumulated almost two combs full of fresh honey from the willows and maples.
“Unite them with that weak colony I found just now,” Carl proposed.
“Just what I was going to do,” Alice returned.
Carl uncovered the weak colony again, while Bob pried off the bottom from the queenless one. Alice blew a little smoke on both colonies, then Bob carefully lifted the queenless hive and set it on top of the other, making a hive in two stories, with two sets of combs.
At first there was a little disturbance as the bees from the two colonies mixed. Several bees rolled out at the entrance, fighting furiously. Then all was quiet; a contented hum arose within. Lifting a corner of the quilt cautiously, Carl saw the queenless bees standing head downward on their combs, fanning with joy at finding themselves attached to a normal family.
“Now those two together should build up and do something, and neither of them would have been any good alone,” said Alice, with satisfaction.
After these two bad colonies, they came to a long series of good ones, crammed with bees and brood, though nearly all light in honey. Then they found a dead one, with the bees still in clusters on the moldy combs. These contained not a drop of honey; probably the insects had starved. Taking out a comb, Alice pointed out how the bees had crawled deep into the cells, in order to make an unbroken block of heat during the winter, thus making the empty combs almost a solid mass of insects. In very cold weather a strong colony, filling a hive, will crowd itself into a cluster no bigger than a cocoanut.
They worked all that morning, stopped for an hour at noon, and went at it again. By evening they had finished the inspection, and were decidedly disappointed.