It was only two or three days after the excitement of the swarming out that Mary and I saw one of these curtains or hanging festoons of bees making wax, and you may be sure we tried to watch it closely. The bees hung to each other by their legs and kept quite still. The curtain hung down fully six inches from the ceiling of the house, and the first or upper row of bees had therefore to sustain the hanging weight of all those below. And there were certainly several hundred bees in the curtain. The wax-scales began to appear on the second day. And many of them fell off and down to the floor of the house. Some of the scales were plucked off by other workers and carried in their mouths to where a new comb had been started before the swarming, and either used by themselves to help in the comb-building or given to comb-builders already at work. Some of the scales were plucked off by the wax-making workers themselves, who then left the curtain and carried the wax-scales to the seat of the comb-building operations. Various other workers picked up from the floor the fallen scales and carried them to the comb-builders. These building bees would chew up pieces of wax in their mouths, mixing it with saliva, and then would press and mould it with their little trowel-like jaws against the comb, so as to build up steadily the familiar six-sided cells. Each layer of comb is composed of a double tier or layer of these cells, a common partition or base serving as bottom of each tier. The cells to be used for brood are of two sizes, smaller ones for workers to be reared in, and larger ones for the drones. Sometimes the queen lays drone eggs in worker cells and then the cells have to be built up higher when the drone-grub gets too large for its cell. Sometimes, too, the worker bees lay eggs--this happens often in a hive bereft by some accident of its queen--but these eggs can only hatch into drones. Occasionally the workers make a mistake and build a queen cell around a drone egg. This happened once in our hive when there were no queen-laid eggs in the brood-cells, and some workers had laid eggs. The workers tried to make a new queen out of one of these eggs, but of course only a worthless drone came out of the queen cell. In building comb and cells for storing honey, new wax is almost exclusively used, but for brood-comb old wax and wax mixed with pollen may be used. Any comb or part of a comb not needed may be torn down and the wax used to build new comb or to cap cells with.