164 



Gleanings in bee culture 

 CAPPING AND COMB-MELTERS UP TO DATE 



BY H. BARTLETT-MILLER 



For large yards eapping-melters have 

 undoubtedly come to stay. Up to now the 

 ultimate desigTi has been undecided, obvi- 

 ously, because too many are designing by 

 experience alone instead of experience and 

 theory. True, experience has shown us a 

 few of the essentials regarding the labor 

 side of their construction; but the effective 

 side, both as to the capacity of the ma- 

 chines and the effect upon the honey, are 

 matters which, tho fully recognized as not 

 fully satisfactory, are (or were) largely 

 unsettled. 



The designing, making, testing, and the 

 discarding of boney-melters of various and 

 successive designs, has, for nine years past, 

 been a hobby with me. Root's double-walled 

 can melter, with the screens, was too readily 

 blocked up, and the honey on the flat bot- 

 tom was too long detained in contact with 

 the heat. No successful capping-melter can 

 have any flat surface. Lots of others have 

 this grave fault. 



The next obstacle is a multiplication of 

 small tubes. This was the objection laid by 

 the editor of Gleanings against Mr. 

 Beuhne's melter, viz., that continued expan- 

 sion and contraction would cause the tubes 

 to leak at their joints. Let me add that I 

 want a melter that the ordinary beekeeper 

 can make with his own soldering-iron; and 

 altho he may manage a few big tubes he 

 cannot and will not fuss around with small 

 tubes, such as Severin's IVl-inch square 

 tubes are; and if the bee-supply firms should 

 turn them out they would be very expen- 

 sive, and also unnecessary. Melters with a 

 wide flat bottom are also out of the race for 

 perfection, as the iron surface buckles; and 

 while the wax and honey flow to the gutter 

 all right, they flow in a few defined streams 

 according to the amount of buckling of the 

 metal, and the rest of such buckled surface 

 is wasting heat only to annoy the operator. 

 The one I illustrated a few years ago also 

 was faulty, because it had to be cleaned out 

 at the bottom of the gutters about every 

 four hours. I want a melter that will go on 

 like the sands of time if need be. 



The greatest fault I have to find with the 

 most promising of the melters so far illus- 

 trated is the lack of melting surface for the 

 amount of fuel used. Another serious fault 

 is that all of them have places at which the 

 flow of honey to the exit is delayed for a 

 longer or shorter space of time. The ideal 

 melter must allow the wax and honey with- 

 out the slumgum to flow uninterruptedly 



and swiftly away from the heat which melt- 

 ed it ; and furthermore — and this is impor- 

 tant — the whole weight of the wax and 

 honey should be used to press the contents 

 of the melter on to as large a surface as is 

 possible to be made available; therefore no 

 inside-heated surface should be upright. 



And now let us see. We will take Sever- 

 in's melter described on page 724, 1911. 

 This has been much lauded, both in New 

 Zealand and in the United States. Mr. Sev- 

 erin has sent out a description of another 

 melter since then which he thinks (I don't) 

 is a great improvement on his 1911 melter. 

 That melter had eleven tubes IV^ inches 

 square and I6I/2 inches long. Thus the 

 actual melting surface was 21/2 x 11 x I6I/2 

 inches, or a total of 454 square inches — far 

 too little surface for the capacity of a 

 melter I8V4 inches long and 161/2 wide and 

 8 deep. Then it had the fatal fault that aU 

 the wax and honey which passed the tubes 

 fell on a flat surface; and everybody who 

 has used a melter knows that the oxidizing 

 of slumgum in contact with heat, such as 

 the slumg-um which stuck to the under sur- 

 face below the tubes must have met with, is 

 the cause of the darkening of the honey. 

 Such a melter ought to have been scraped 

 continually down beneath the tubes — an im- 

 possible job when extracting. Then the fact 

 that the slumgum is not quickly removed 

 from both wax and honey is in itself a 

 damning fact in any melter. 



Now criticising (as I hope all will criti- 

 cise mine) Mr. Severin's new melter de- 

 scribed on p. 15, 1915, the fact of its having 

 those 221 (whewation!) tubes in it, puts it 

 out of court at once; for the man who re- 

 quires an inexpensive affair, and having 

 only half-inch tubes precludes its being a 

 gi'eat success in melting constantly old 

 brood-combs. True, melters were originally 

 made for cappings; but when we want to 

 get honey out of old combs that for various 

 reasons have to be disposed of, you can just 

 bet that the capping-melter will have to do 

 the job. AnyAvay, it ought to be built to do 

 both. Again, all the slumgum of Severin's 

 new melter falls thru the tubes on to a flat 

 surface. To be practical it should all fall 

 upon a screen, to be withdrawn on occasion, 

 and dumped into the wax-boiler, and the 

 honey and wax should run right down a 

 sloping surface to a gutter. 



My melter was designed to melt up, if 

 necessary, every surplus comb in an apiary 

 of 200 colonies, such combs being sometimes 



