. American bee journal. Bee culture; Bees. Mar. 10, 1904. THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 189 Dadant, but in this case I thought our Afri- cander might be to a certain extent correct, and I gave, that year, only narrow starters. Now I have the experience and about 500 poor combs. They are irregularly built, many of them at best are fastened only -V. of the way down the side-bars; they tlab and break in the extractor. Some have the midrib not in the center of the frame, and others have more drone than worl<er cells. Take it altogether, not one ciuarter of them are fit for use in the brood-chamber.
. American bee journal. Bee culture; Bees. Mar. 10, 1904. THE AMERICAN BEE JOURNAL. 189 Dadant, but in this case I thought our Afri- cander might be to a certain extent correct, and I gave, that year, only narrow starters. Now I have the experience and about 500 poor combs. They are irregularly built, many of them at best are fastened only -V. of the way down the side-bars; they tlab and break in the extractor. Some have the midrib not in the center of the frame, and others have more drone than worl<er cells. Take it altogether, not one ciuarter of them are fit for use in the brood-chamber. In " Editoral Comments,'' page 51, men- tion is made of a Mr. M. W. Shepherd as being perhaps the first one to give the philosophy of the buckling of combs. This statement breaks my silence, and as this troublesome buckling is an entirely mechanical fault, I have given it considerable study, as a me- chanic, not as a bee-keeper. I have as badly buckled combs as any one can show, and I have others that are as nice and level as if they had been leveled with a smoothing- plane. I am not going to blame the founda- tion or frame material for those poor combs, for we know it of old that poor mechanics al- ways fight with their tools. As my good and poor combs were made of the same lot of material, only at different times, the fault must be with me (and I found it was). Mr. Shepherd claims that when the side-bars are but '4-inch thick, the wires tight, and the comb becomes loaded, the side-bars will spring, the wire slackens, and the comb buckles. With due respect to Mr. Shepherd, I will leave it to the house to decide whether his explanation sounds reasonable. I would judge that when the side-bars spring, and the wire slacken, the combs will sag, but not buckle. If you expose comb honey in sections to frost, they will crack, and if you tap with your finger on a frame with an empty, frozen comb it may break. This and a hundred other things prove that wax contracts in cold and ex
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1860, booksubjectbees, bookyear1861
