1906 



GLEANINGS IN BEE CULTURE. 



437 



THE WIRE-CLOTH SEPARATOR 

 DEMNED. 



CON- 



Brace Combs and Propolis; Tinker Zinc Better 

 than Wire Cloth. 



BY C. H. DIBBERN. 



I have read and reread your editorial on 

 pages 278, '9, with a good deal of interest 

 and astonishment. Now, I have a good deal 

 of respect for the opinions and experience of 

 Mr. House and Mr. Salisbury, as well as 

 your own; but your conclusions are so dia- 

 metrically opposed to all my experience that 

 I feel it a duty to bee-keepers to sound a 

 warning note before a lot of money is wast- 

 ed. I gave these separators a very thorough 

 trial some twenty years ago. I can not now 

 bring myself to believe that my conclusions 

 were not good. I will now simply give my 



ficult to clean, and the brace- comb nuisance 

 seemed to increase the longer I used them. 

 Then I found that some seasons the bees 

 would make a thin comb on the separators, 

 thinking, probably, it was some new kind of 

 foundation, notwithstanding full sheets were 

 used in the sections. 



I now became thoroughly disgusted with 

 them, though I continued using some of 

 them for a number of years. I think it was 

 about 1892 that Mr. Betsinger took out a 

 patent on wire-cloth separators, and cau- 

 tioned bee-keepers against using them be- 

 fore paying him a royalty. I well remem- 

 ber laughing to myself while reading it, 

 feeling that he was welcome to all he could 

 make out of it. During the last ten years 

 all my wire-cloth separators hav e been piled 

 away on the shelves in the shop with a lot 

 of other abandoned things. 



WIRE- CLOTH SEPARATOR SHOWING HOW THE BEES BUILT COMB ON IT. 



experience, and bee-keepers can form their 

 own conclusions. 



It was in 1886 that my attention was 

 drawn to some wire cloth we had in the 

 store, used principally for sand screen. I 

 thought it would make a good separator. 

 That year I tried some 200 of the separators ; 

 and to say that I was delighted with them 

 expresses it mildly. The next season I cut 

 up several rolls of the wire cloth, making 

 about 1000 more separators. That season 

 my enthusiasm began to wane, as I began 

 to notice a good deal of brace- comb; and 

 then, too, the bees would daub lots of pro- 

 polis where the separators pass between the 

 section. Still I was not satisfied that these 

 objections could not be overcome, and con- 

 tinued to use all of them the next year; in 

 fact, I used more or less of them for about 

 ten years. I soon found they were very dif- 



Now, as there is a possibility that the sep- 

 arators I used were made of a different kind 

 of wire cloth from that you now have under 

 consideration, I will inclose a piece of a sep- 

 arator I used. This was used more than ten 

 years ago, and still shows the fish-bone of a 

 piece of comb the bees attached to it. Since 

 reading your article I have been thinking of 

 various ways of overcoming my objections. 

 The only way to clean effectually the sepa- 

 rators is to boil them; but that soon seems 

 to cause them to rust. Perhaps this might 

 be obviated by drying them immediately and 

 dipping them in linseed oil. That, too, might 

 overcome the trouble of excessive propolizing 

 and brace-combs. I tried to have the mill 

 making the wire cloth pass the cloth through 

 heavy rolls, so as to make it thinner, and 

 not leave so many rough places for the bees 

 to daub up, and make them easier to scrape, 



