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