Bee-keepinr/ in Victoria. 99 



no matter how many bees they swallow at waterholes where bees come 

 to drink, or which they catch on low flowering plants such as dandelions 

 and clovers. Quite early in his bee-keeping experience the writer was 

 compelled to dispense with ducks, for they would do little else than eat 

 bees from morning to evening. Fowls do not in any way interfere with 

 bees nor bees with fowls. ^Vhen insect food is scarce, fowls will eat 

 dead bees, and sometimes drones, but I have never known them to eat 

 live workers. 



XXI. -Beeswax. 



" Beeswax has its origin in the nectar or honey consumed by bees 

 and transformed by them into fatty matter by a process of digestion 

 and secretion. It is an organic, not a mechanical production, and issues 

 in the form of scales from between the ventral plates of the abdomen of 

 the worker bee." (T. W. Cowan, Wax Craft, page 45.) 



The production of wax by the honey bee is in a certain ratio to that 

 of honey; thus, bees in trees or box hives yield, on the average, one 

 pound of wax to twenty pounds of honey. With the introduction of the 

 bar frame hive, and the method of extracting the honey from the combs 

 and returning them to the hive to be refilled with honey by the bees, the 

 ratio of wax to honey has been considerably altered and stands at 1 to 80. 

 In other words, the production of extracted honey for the same weight 

 of wax is four times that of the primitive method of cutting out the 

 combs to obtain the honey. As a result, the price of honey has declined 

 while that of wax has advanced during recent years. The wax is the 

 product of a transformation of the honey or nectar when retained in 

 the body of the bee for a time under certain conditions. Many attemjjts 

 have been made to turn surplus honey into wax by feeding it back to 

 the bees, but none have proved successful from a commercial point of 

 view. While, therefore, the proportion of wax to honey cannot be pro- 

 fitably increased, so far as its production is concerned, there is room 

 for much improvement in the methods of obtaining the wax from the 

 combs, in the handling, refining and marketing. 



Thousands of pounds of beeswax are annually thrown away, or 

 burned with old black brood combs, because the old-fashioned method 

 of boiling the combs in a bag submerged under water fails in obtaining 

 more than a mere fraction of the wax contained in them. iN^ew comb 

 consists entirely of wax, and is white or yellow in colour, according to 

 the flora from which the bees obtained the nectar converted into wax. 

 When brood is reared in the cells the comb first becomes brown and, 

 after a time, black, tough, and heavy. Each bee larva, before changing 

 to the chrysalis stage, spins a cocoon, and as generation succeeds genera- 

 tion in the same cells old brood comb contains numbers of these in each 

 cell, one inside the other; but, although the appearance of the comb is 

 entirely changed, the original wax cells are still there. When old brood 

 comb is dissolved by boiling in water each of the cocoons set loose by 

 the melting of the comb becomes coated with liquid wax which clings 

 to the fibrous material of the cocoons, and but little will rise to the 

 surface when boiled in a bag kept under water. 



