BEES AND BEE-KEEPING. 
178 
alterations. Whatever plan be adopted for heating 
wax, care should always be exercised in preventing 
burning. 
The fact just now enunciated, that bees will accept 
and utilise a wax midrib, prepares the way for the 
description of a device which was the earliest to 
strive to take the fullest advantage of all it implies. 
The conception that complete artificial midribs might 
be adopted was a grand one, and, although failure 
attended the first experiments, failure but pointed the 
way to a success finally so complete and important 
that its effect on apiculture is already only second to 
that of the introduction of the movable-comb system 
itself. Great thoughts do not always, in their incep- 
tion, show their importance, and so history often fails 
where we most desire her teachings ; but it would 
appear that one Kretchmer, a German, about 1843, 
dipped tracing-linen into molten wax, and afterwards 
passed it between rollers to give it the form of the 
midrib. The bees would, probably, start their combs 
upon the lines laid down for them, but, reaching the 
fibres of the linen, they would, in their endeavours to 
tease them out, involve the handiwork of their 
human helper and director in hopeless ruin. Another 
German (Mehring), fourteen years later, contrived 
wooden moulds, in which the wax received the 
desired shape ; but these gave way to others for 
casting type-metal plates (Fig. 47), upon which the 
facsimile of the rhombic bases of perfect cells were 
so accurately formed that the two plates in my posses- 
sion, put face to face, fit into one another without a 
traceable loss of contact in anv part. These marvels 
