CHAPTER III 
Bee-keepers’ Requisites 
Comb Foundation.—It is this wonderful 
invention that with the bar-frame has made 
bee-keeping a practical factor; without it, 
indeed, the bar-frame hive would be useless 
from a commercial point of view. The ‘‘ comb- 
foundation’’ is a thin sheet of bees-wax, 
impressed by machinery, on both sides, with 
true hexagonal, or six-sided, bases of cells, 
a slight foundation for the walls being also 
impressed. ‘Thus the bees are given a start, as 
it were, in their work. This foundation is 
made either with ‘‘ worker’’ or ‘‘drone’’ cells 
and the bees will follow unfailingly the lead 
thus given them in their building. It is 
made in three degrees of thickness—‘‘thin,”’ 
‘*medium,’’ and ‘‘thick’’; the first for use in 
sections, and the others in the brood chamber. 
As a rule bee-keepers in England buy only 
the worker-brood foundation, for should drones 
be required they can be secured by merely 
cutting away the lower part of a honey-comb, 
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