HIVES FOR BEE-KEEPERS. 
lOI 
loosening the screws. I will endeavour to explain 
how we overcome the usual difficulties accompanying 
such frames. By virtue of the exceeding shallowness 
of our frames, and the use of comb foundation, we 
procure combs almost perfectly straight. The greatest 
trouble usually arises from uneven combs — combs irre- 
gular at their tops, just above the cells occupied with 
brood. This occurs mainly from the fact that, where 
bees use combs for storing, they leave only about Jin. 
space between them, while those used for brood are 
about twice that distance apart. These shallow frames, 
and the practice of inverting and interchanging the 
cases containing them, give us straight, uniform combs 
throughout, and completely filled with brood, nearly all 
the time we manipulate them.^' In criticising these 
close-ended frames, which are ten times more difficult 
of management if placed, as we here have them, in an 
external case, instead of in the manner adopted by 
Hetherington or Bingham, we must, to be fair, 
remember that the idea is “ to manipulate hives, not 
frames,^’ and that almost every required operation 
can, it is held, be performed without the removal 
of the latter ; but, giving these considerations their 
fullest weight, it must still be admitted that Mr. 
Broughton Carr but expressed what almost all British 
bee-keepers would endorse, when he says :* In 
our apiary, the whole affair, frames and screws, 
would become fixed and immovable with propolis, 
damp, &c., in a single season. We have always had 
an insuperable objection to close-ended frames, on 
account of the bee-crushing and propolisation they 
* Bee-keepers' Record, December, 1886, page 214. 
