378 
FRAMES 
honey. Considerable of this dead brood 
will be found in the early spring. The 
bees readily pick it out of the cells; and 
as soon as natural pollen comes in, the 
trouble will disappear. 
DEAD BROOD FROM DRONE-LAYING QUEENS OR 
LAYING WORKERS. 
Under Brood, reference is made to the 
fact that drone brood or laying-worker 
brood will often be found dead, and a 
stinking mass. The cells will be perforated, 
and the odor will be very much like that 
from American foul brood in an advanced 
stage. The fact that it does not rope 
rather suggests to the inexperienced that it 
may be European foul brood; and many 
times ABC scholars write us, describing 
this trouble, and asking whether it is foul 
brood. 
The remedy is, of course, to remove the 
drone-laying queen or break up the laying- 
worker colony. 
One may rest easy if he finds all worker 
brood healthy, and nothing but drone or 
laying-worker brood dead. 
EXPERT DIAGNOSIS. 
Even tho the symptoms of the two brood 
diseases have been given very minutely, the 
reader, if he has never seen either one, 
may not be able to distinguish which one 
he may have. Possibly he has nothing 
worse than sacbrood or chilled or starved 
brood. While it was the custom of the 
author to examine all suspected samples 
sent in, and determine what they were, it 
is much better to send them to the Apicul- 
tural Investigator, Bureau of Entomology, 
Washington, D. C. The samples will then 
be examined by experts equipped with mi¬ 
croscopes, after which a report will be 
sent back immediately, giving the exact 
nature of the diseases with full directions 
how to proceed. 
There are some cases that are so confus¬ 
ing that even the inspectors themselves can 
not determine whether the case is Ameri¬ 
can or European. Nothing but examina¬ 
tion by competent bacteriologists can de¬ 
termine what it is. It has several times 
happened that the foul-brood inspectors 
have treated America for European, and 
vice versa, with the result that nothing was 
accomplished, and valuable time was lost. 
It is highly important that the apiarist in 
any event send a sample to the Bureau in 
order to avoid expensive mistakes. 
FOUNDATION. —See Comb Founda¬ 
tion. 
FRAMES. —These are devices for hold¬ 
ing combs while in the hive and are some¬ 
times called racks. They make possible 
modern manipulation by which every comb 
can be inspected, removed, transposed—in 
fact, the whole internal economy of the 
hive can be determined. The straw skep 
and the box hive of olden days had no 
frames, nor does the same hive in use to¬ 
day in parts of Europe and southeastern 
United States. See Box Hives. 
As shown under Hives, Evolution of, 
there were many crude ways of making 
combs movable—some better than others. 
Perhaps the crudest of all was to cut them 
out and put them back again. Later on, 
combs were built from single bars. This 
necessitated cutting the combs from the 
sides of the hive to effect a removal. To 
these bars were later attached other bars, 
making up a complete frame. But such 
frames were almost immovable. While they 
could be taken out of the hive it required a 
great amount of patience and time, to say 
nothing about bee-killing. 
It remained for the Rev. L. L. Lang- 
stroth, of this country, then a Presbyter¬ 
ian minister, to discover a principle that 
would make every comb or frame remov¬ 
able. To construct a frame that will inclose 
a comb required no great act of invention; 
but to make a frame so it could be readily 
removed from its fellows, without smash¬ 
ing or irritating bees, required the work 
of a genius, and that genius was Lang- 
stroth. 
Under the head of A B G op Beekeep¬ 
ing, Hives, Evolution of, and Bee-space, 
it is explained that he discovered the prin¬ 
ciple of a bee-space—a space that bees re¬ 
spect, and never fill with comb or bee glue. 
(See Bee-space.) Taking advantage of 
this principle, Langstroth saw that, in or¬ 
der to make his frame movable, he must 
provide a bee-space all around. The next 
problem that .he met was how to support 
and hold each frame so that there would 
be not only a bee-space all around between 
it and the top, bottom, and end of the hive, 
