APIARY EXPERIMENTS. 
FOUNDATION IN COMB BUILDING. 
By CLARENCE P. GILLETTE. 
Honey bees collect liquid sweets from all available sources, 
chiefly in the form of nectar from flowers, and when the product 
has been elaborated in the honey-stomach and afterwards stored in 
comb, we call it honey. 
The material from w T hich the comb is built is not collected as 
wax, but is formed within the body and secreted in the form of thin 
scales between the abdominal segments on the under side. 
As the wax is elaborated within the body, the bee must be 
supplied with food out of which to form it and, according to ex¬ 
periments reported on another page, it requires about one pound 
of wax for every twenty-five pounds of honey stored in comb. 
The food required for the secretion of wax is, for the most part, 
honey; and as it requires several pounds of corn to produce one 
pound of beef or butter, so it doubtless requires several pounds of 
honey as food for worker bees to enable them to produce one pound 
of wax. 
But the consumption of honey for wax production does not 
represent the total cost of the wax to the colony. The bees that 
secrete it are called off* from the field force, so that the income of 
the colony is lessened. In a state of nature this wax production 
entails no heavy drain upon the the colon}', as the comb, once built, 
lasts for years; but where comb honey is being produced for the mar¬ 
ket, it becomes a matter of economic importance to know to what 
extent and in what form wax can best be furnished bees for their 
use in comb building. 
So far as we know at present, there is but one general way to 
furnish the w r ax for this use, and that is in some form of artificial 
comb foundation. But their are many types of this foundation. Is 
it better to have the base or midrib only—the “no wall” foundation? 
or is it better to have the cell walls outlined for the bees ? If the 
latter, should we have these walls short or long? In either case, is 
