Should the time be near the swarming season the combs will be so filled with brood and honey that the task will be much greater, and the transfer should be postponed until three weeks after the first swarm issues. The brood left by the old queen will have matured and issued from the cells by that time, and the young queen, if no accident has happened to her, will have begun laying; yet there will usually be only eggs, with perhaps a few very young larvæ, present in the combs at this time, so that the cutting out and fitting of the latter into frames will not be as troublesome nor attended with so much waste as just before the swarm issued. Still another plan--one which it would not be best to employ before fairly warm weather has set in, but which will render the work of transferring the lightest--is to turn the box hive bottom upward and place on it the brood apartment of a frame hive, having in it frames filled with worker combs or with comb foundation, arranging at the same time to give the bees ready access from their combs to those above and no entrance to their hive except through the frame hive above. This can easily be done by making a temporary bottom board for the frame hive, with several holes through it, or with one large one about the size of the open end of the box hive. As soon as it is perceived that the queen has taken possession of the new combs--as she will be almost certain to do, especially if one of the combs placed above contains some brood--a piece of queen-excluding zinc placed over the opening between the two hives will keep her above, and three weeks later, when all the brood in the combs below has matured, the box hive may be removed and the combs transferred to frames, if worth using in this way; but if old or composed of drone cells or very irregular in shape these combs may be rendered into wax, after extracting any honey that may happen to be in them. Inverting the box hive will generally cause the bees to remove what honey they have stored in the combs. This honey will be utilized in building out the foundation placed in the added story, or, having these combs completed, the bees will store in them whatever remains. Should the queen fail to enter the superposed hive, the plan may be adopted of driving her with her workers into the added story, as described on page 72. When the lower combs have been nearly deserted it will be safe to assume that the queen has gone into the upper hive with the main force of workers, and the excluder zinc may be inserted. QUEENLESSNESS IN SPRING.