‘Now, Stephaans,’ said she to Steve, ‘you or your friends must come and look at a bee-hive that a _winkelier_ (shopkeeper) made me buy in town last week. It is one of those new-fangled patent things. Its inside is full of pieces of wood--goodness only knows what for. They say it is better than just an empty box for the bees. I don’t understand it. Do you or any of your friends understand it?’ Now Steve saw a chance to distinguish himself in the way he liked to do--by being useful. Apiarian books had been among his favourite studies, so he knew all about it, having always kept one or more hives for study and also for--honey. ‘Well, _Tante_, if you will send for the hive, I shall explain all about it to you.’ The hive came, and Steve surprised even his companions by the learned dissertation he gave on bees and bee-keeping. He surprised the simple old gentleman and his lady almost into disbelief, when he told them the queen was the mother of all the bees in the hive; that she was only a fully developed female bee, reared from the self-same egg from which the worker bee is raised, and that she is only made a queen by over feeding and by giving her more space to grow out in in the cell. That the drones, or, as they called them in Dutch, _water-carriers_, are not water-carriers, but that they are, in fact, great, lazy, good-for-nothing male bees, who love to live on what the females earned in the fields, and absolutely refuse to do any work (as so many of their sex, even in the human race, delight to do); that, in fact, they were unable to do any work--not being built that way; but were only called into existence to be husbands to the young queens, which may be raised during the season for the purpose of sending out swarms, and thus obey the command of the Creator when He said, ‘Go forth and multiply.’ But their surprise reached its climax, when he told them that he could make the bees manufacture a queen for themselves, should they be queenless, by simply giving them eggs or larvæ to make her from; that, in fact, he could force them to make as many queens to his order as he liked by simple manipulation, and that he could thus make three or four swarms of bees out of one in a season. He tried to explain to them all this, and by explaining the why and the wherefore, he soon got them to believe and understand him. He also showed them how to fix and wire the wax foundation in the frames, and thus spare the poor bees a lot of work; also told them how, by the use of an extractor, they could extract all the honey from the combs without breaking the comb, and thus save the bees the time and expense of wax to rebuild it. ‘All you have to do is to replace the empty comb in the hive, when the bees refill it.’