22 
DR. MILLER'S 
then in the morning you will not forget to take out the wax 
before building the fire. 
Then you scrape the dirt from the bottom of the cake, 
which you can do more easily while the cake is a little warm. 
With a large amount of such scrapings it may be worth while to 
melt the whole to get out the little wax in it, but with a small 
amount it is not worth the trouble. 
Q. Is beeswax injured by coming to a boil? If so, can it be 
detected that the wax has been boiled? 
A. Bringing to a boil will hardly hurt it if not repeated too 
much, nor continued too long, and I don’t believe the short boiling 
could be detected. 
Q. Will a brass or copper vessel injure the quality of the wax? 
A. I think not. Iron will darken it. 
Q. How many pounds of honey does it take to make one 
pound of wax? 
A. For a long time it was counted 20 pounds. Then some fig- 
ured it out 7 pounds or less. Possibly 10 or 12 pounds may not be 
far out of the way. 
Beeswax, Rendering (See Combs, Rendering.) 
Bee Supplies, Ordering. — Q. I have 12 colonies of bees in good 
movable-frame hives. I am a beginner. What shall I order in 
the way of supplies? I wish to run for comb honey and increase 
by natural swarming. I have nothing in the way of tools, and 
my time is limited, as I am a rural mail carrier. 
A. It is not an easy thing to tell what anyone needs without 
pretty full particulars as to harvest and conditions. In general 
terms I should say that you should have on hand enough sections 
all ready in supers in advance, so that you can give to the bees as 
many as they would fill in the best season you have ever known, 
and then an extra one for each colony besides. Possibly you 
have had so little experience that you don’t kno.w what the bees 
would do in the very best kind of a season. Well, then, we might 
guess that in the very best kind of a year you would get an aver- 
age of 125 sections per colony, although that may be putting it 
pretty low if you are in a good location. If your supers hold 24 
sections each, as a good many supers do, it would take about five 
supers to hold the 124 sections, as we don’t need to be so exact 
about it. But some colonies will fill more than the five, and some 
less; you can’t hold them to the exact number, and at the last there 
will necessarily be more or less unfinished sections on the hives 
