22 



AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL 



Jan. 10, 1901. 



Convention Proceedings. | 



Report of the Proceedings of the 31st Annual 



Convention of the National Bee-Keepers' 



Association, held at Chicag-o, 111., 



Aug-. 28, 29 and 30, 1900. 



BV DR. A. B. MASON, SEC. 



(Continued from pa^e 6.) 



COMB FOUNDATION— EXPERIMENTS, ETC. 



Prof. Gillette — I have been experimenting- some the last 

 three or four years at the Colorado Experiment Station, at 

 Fort Collins, to determine the manner in which the bees 

 handle the foundation that is g-iven them. It seems to me 

 on so very important a question we ought to have more 

 light. What weight foundation is best, for example, to use 

 in the brood-chamber, and what is the best weight to use 

 for comb honey? and to what extent does the giving of the 

 foundation lessen the wax secreted by the bees? Do the 

 bees really take the wax from the foundation and build it 

 up both in the cells and down in the midrib of the comb? 

 If so, to what extent? The experiments that I want to re- 

 port upon are chiefly along these lines, and before proceed- 

 ing, I might say what I say to you was publishtjust re- 

 cently in Bulletin 54 of the Experiment Station at Ft. Col- 

 lins, which any of you can obtain, so long as they last, bj- 

 simply addressing a letter to the director, and requesting 

 Bulletin 54, on "Experiments in Apiaries." First, Ithought 

 I would endeavor to determine definitely whether or not 

 bees do use the wax in the foundation. Everybody be- 

 lieves they do; no one doubts it; but I wanted absolute proof 

 of it. I went to Mr. Elliott, who makes comb foundation, 

 and askt if he could make for me some rather light founda- 

 tion, and work into it a large amount of lampblack so as to 

 make it exceedingly black. This he did, as you can see by 

 looking at the sample of foundation which I have here — a 

 small piece of it — just as black as coai, or nearlv so. This 

 is about a medium weight of super foundation for comb 

 honey; that was used in the sections. I used a strip one 

 inch wide at the top for some of the sections, but others I 

 put in a full sheet; by "full sheet," I mean a sheet like that 

 of the black foundation. I find I haven't in my trunk — I 

 didn't come from home and have not the samples that I had 

 from the experiment station to show you, but I will simplj- 

 have to tell you, and you will have to take my word for it. 

 Where foundation like that was used, about one inch, it was 

 workt down into the comb so that the black color would 

 show nearly to the ends of the cells. I happen to have a 

 little piece here from the full-piece foundation. This was 

 fully drawn at the center; this comes out here near the 

 sides. The cell-walls this far [indicating] are black, and 

 the foundations used are nearly so. 



A Member — Do 1 understand you to mean the black 

 workt down from the strip of lampblack foundation at that 

 part? 



Prof. Gillette— Yes, so that in cutting thru the comb 

 and looking at the edge of it, the black nearly faded out at 

 the ends of the cells. 



A Member— What was the object of getting that black 

 to start with? 



Prof. Gilette — To see to what extent the bees did take 

 that wax, and whether they used it right there where it was 

 placed, or whether they carried it it all over the hive and 

 used it in the foundation; in some places, a small amount of 

 black wax was taken up by the colonies and used in smear- 

 ing, but not to any great extent did they carry it away into 

 any other section— used it right there;' drawn right down 

 into the midrib of the comb. Having proved definitely 

 that they do use the wax in this way, I wanted to know 

 whether or not they get that wax from the midrib of the 

 foundation, or whether they get it from the cell-walls. For 

 example, let that represent a section, tho the foundation, as 

 you look at it, are the edges there. In any foundation 

 there would be found, or in nearly all the foundations there 

 would also be a short cell-wall as shown there. Now, do 

 the bees get this wax that they build the cells out of, wholly 

 from those little short cell-walls, or do they go down into 

 the base and midrib itself, and use it in building out the 

 cell-wall and^extending the midrib? First, do thev use the 



wax that is in the midrib? This I determined by three or 

 four different means. First, by weighing the midrib. They 

 drew out this wax into combs. The comb was then put into 

 water and the honey all extracted, if they had filled it with 

 honey. The cells were scraped off from the two sides, until 

 thej- had only the midrib left. Here, for example, is a mid- 

 rib that has been built out in a comb and the cells taken 

 off again. Here is a sample of the foundation, on which 

 that comb was built. Then I took pieces of foundation 

 and of the midrib from the comb on that foundation, 

 cut them in different sizes, and weighed them, and I found 

 that the weight of the original foundation was considerably 

 more than the weight of the midrib taken out of the comb 

 built upon that foundation. But now it might be possible 

 that the difference in the weight was all due to their using 

 these little short cell-walls. The very heavy foundation 

 weighed 11 grains to the square inch. Septum from the 

 comb only weighed eight grains to the square inch after the 

 bees had built the comb upon it and the comb-cells had been 

 removed; then there is the difference between 8 and 11, or 

 three grains to the square inch of the septum that had been 

 used. In case of medium foundation, of which I have a 

 sample here, and a sample of the midrib of the comb 

 built upon this foundation — the foundation itself weighed 

 8.4 grains to the square inch; this midrib out of the comb 

 weighed 5.18 grains to the square inch, being a difference 

 there of about 3'; grains to the square inch of the midrib 

 that the bees had used. The deep-cell foundation was also 

 used; the foundation weighed 5.46 grains to the square inch. 

 After the comb had been built upon the foundation and the 

 comb-cells removed, then the midrib weighed only 3.44 

 grains to the square inch; but if I should take this foun- 

 dation and cut off the deep walls here, just as close as I 

 could, this foundation midrib weighed only 2'z grains per 

 square inch. It actually weighs less right here in this found- 

 ation than it does after the bees have built the comb upon 

 it, because they do fill in, in some places, on the bottom, 

 and make it a little heavier, and the natural-comb septum, 

 taking comb the bees have built entirely, not having given 

 them any foundation at all, removing the cell-walls and 

 taking the midrib of this comb, and it weighed but 2.1 grains 

 to the square inch. The difference in weights here was evi- 

 dently more than could be accounted for by the removal 

 simply of these small cell-walls. 



A Member — Were all those tested alike, by being im- 

 merst in water? 



Prof. Gillette — No, sir, not in all cases. There were 

 cases where there was no honey at all. Those were not put 

 in water. In all cases they werethoroly dried before using; 

 very frequently' two or three days elapst before they were 

 used. The next method which I used for determining 

 whether or not they take the wax out of the midrib, was to 

 fill the comb with plaster, and that was suggested to me by 

 Pres. Root. I filled the comb with plaster of Paris, and 

 making sections of it and measuring the width of the mid- 

 rib, and cut in that way, as Pres. Root has explained in his 

 paper, this holds the midrib; it is perfect, it is not spread 

 out at all. I found by measuring the midrib of the comb 

 built upon a foundation — it was in all cases where heavy 

 foundation was used — the comb was very thin. In cases 

 where light foundations were used, foundations in which 

 the midrib does not extend seventeen one-hundredths of a 

 millimeter, that they did not thin the midrib to any extent, 

 usually not at all, which seems to me quite an important 

 matter. If the midrib of the foundation does not extend 

 seventeen one-hundredths of a millimeter in thickness, the 

 bees will thin it but little, if any, very little indeed; very of- 

 ten scratch it over to make it opaque, but very little used; if 

 thicker than that, they are sure to thin it some, but never 

 thinning it down to the thinness of the midrib in the nat- 

 ural comb. Is that clear? If you use a heavy foundation 

 the bees never thin the midrib down to the thinness of the 

 midrib in the natural comb not in any case that I have 

 found. I have placed upon the table here some of the differ- 

 ent midribs that have been taken from combs; here is a 

 specimen of midrib from natural comb, all made by the bees, 

 and those other midribs are midribs taken from different 

 specimens of combs made upon foundation. You will not 

 find any as light as the natural-comb midrib, except in the 

 kind where the deep-cell foundation is used. In some of 

 those cases it is as thin as the natural. Do the bees thicken 

 the walls of the comb where it is built upon foundation? I 

 think there has been a difference of opinion in regard to 

 that, some thinking that no matter how thick — how much 

 wax you may put in the little short cells of the foundation, 

 the bees will always thin it down to the thinness of the nat- 

 urally built comb. To determine that point I proceeded in 



