l8 COMB FOUNDATION. 



and twenty pounds of honey. As the combs are destroyed 

 with the bees under the old system, while they last four or 

 five years in the frame hive, the economy in the latter is 

 apparent, more especially as a swarm of bees, having to 

 build their own combs without assistance, will lose about 

 three weeks of the best part of the honey-gathering season. 

 To insure straight combs in frame hives, sheets of wax 

 which, by being passed through suitably engraved rollers, 

 are embossed with the bases of worker cells, are fixed in the 

 frames by means of the saw groove made in the top bar for 

 the purpose. Most frame hives are sent out with a strip of 

 foundation, about one inch in depth, called a starter, fixed 

 in the frames, but this is not sufficient for the object in 

 view, as the bees will often build the remainder of the comb 

 with drone cells, and this wiir invariably be the case when 

 casts, or after-swarms, are hived on frames having only 

 starters. To understand the very great loss caused by 

 having an excess of drone comb in the hive, it is necessary 

 to remember that a square inch of comb gives space for 

 rearing fifty-six worker bees, while the same area will give 

 space for rearing about forty-four drones, so that the sub- 

 stitution of a single square inch of drone for worker comb 

 not only deprives the bee-keeper of the services of fifty-six 

 workers, or producers, every three weeks during the season, 

 but it saddles him with the loss caused by rearing forty-four 

 drones, or consumers, every month during the same period. 

 If, instead of a single inch of drone comb, there are several 

 hundred square inches in the hive, the loss will, as a matter 

 of course, be in proportion. Some drone comb is absolutely 

 necessary in every stock of bees, but the less of it there is 

 the better for the bee-keeper's return of honey. The price 

 of foundation varies from 2S. per lb. for a single pound to 

 IS. lod., or less, for ten to twenty pounds. About one and 

 a-half pounds are required to fill eleven frames, the number 

 usually required in each stock. The operation of fixing 

 the foundation in the frames is very simple. A piece of 

 board about eighteen inches in length has a couple of wire 

 nails driven through it at a quarter-inch distance from each 

 other, so that their points project about three-eighths of an 

 inch. The wood is placed on a table, the heads of the nails 



