62 
DR. MILLER'S 
advise that combs be renewed every four or five years, but 1 
think the idea is based only upon theory. Without any careful 
examination one might easily conclude that as something more 
than was there before is left in the cell, every time a young bee is 
reared in it, the cell must necessarily become smaller. But ex- 
amine carefully and you’ll find that the diameter of the cell at its 
mouth remains the same. You will probably find that the bees 
gnaw out some of the cocoon at the sides, leaving it at the bot- 
tom. That, of course, will make the cell shallower, but to make 
up for that, the bees add fresh wax to the cell-wall at the mouth 
of the cell. If they add to the cell-wall at the mouth, that ought 
to increase the thickness of the comb, oughtn’t it? Well, that’s 
exactly what it does. Measure the thickness of a piece of worker- 
comb from which the first batch of brood has just emerged, and 
you will find it measures seven-eighths of an inch. Take one old 
enough, and it will be fully an inch thick, and you will find the 
septum one-eighth of an inch thick. The only practical danger 
is that if the combs get to be old enough the spacing from center 
to center may become too small; in other words, the space be- 
tween two combs becomes smaller. Don’t worry about good, 
straight combs being hurt with age. 
Combs, Rendering into Wax. — Q. I have a lot of combs from 
hives in which the bees winter-killed; also from late swarms last 
year that starved out during the long, cold winter. How can I 
convert these combs into beeswax? 
A. If you have enough to make it worth while, the best way to 
get the wax out of your combs is to get one of the wax-presses or 
extractors that will leave in the remains a very small amount of 
wax. For a very few combs, however, it may not pay to spend 
much, and the solar extractor will do. You may also get out a 
large per cent with a dripping-pan. Take an old dripping-pan 
(of course, a new one would answer), split it open at one cor- 
ner, put it in the oven of a cook-stove, with the split end pro- 
jecting out of the oven so that a vessel set under it will catch the 
dripping wax. Put a pebble or something else under the inside 
corner, so as to make the wax flow outward. If the comb be pre- 
viously soaked with water several days, and a single comb at a 
time be laid in the pan, the wax will not be tempted to hide in 
the cups made by the cocoons. But it will be slow work. You 
may also break the combs up into bits, provided you can have 
them cold enough to be brittle, put them in a gunny sack in a 
