2o6 
BEES AND BEE-KEEPING, 
rounding the pins are somewhat broken, but an hour 
at most finds all repairs completed. 
With the object of giving combs solidity, thin pine 
boards have been coated with wax, and then passed 
through a flat-bottomed foundation machine. The 
idea originated in America, and was not accounted 
successful. Good combs are at times built ; but if 
the bees, in excavating, get down to the resisting 
wood, instinct seems to tell them that no cell can 
back on to the one in hand, and they immediately 
start from the wood-face a strut, which begins a 
comb, built between the boards instead of upon them. 
This instinct prevented more than a very partial 
success in my attempts to get cells built upon glass, 
in order to study the development of the egg and 
larva ; but it is by no means difficult to secure what 
many would regard as a curiosity — a comb, three cells 
thick, actually having two midribs. Next a sheet of 
brood, place a slab of sealed honey in a full stock, 
giving rather an excessive interspace. Draw it back, 
little by little, as cells are built up on the face of the 
honey ; eggs will be laid, and brood in due time 
matured. I have had several such combs in my 
possession. 
It is usual, at the present time, in America, to 
prevent sagging, and secure flatness and solidity, by 
“wiring^’ the frames, and subsequently fixing the 
foundation in place — a practice but little followed, as 
yet, in England, partially, no doubt, because of our 
more temperate climate, while we use sheets of 
considerable thickness. The top and bottom bars 
are finely pierced, as in Fig. 59, when fine tinned 
