. A book about bees. Their history, habits, and instincts; together with the first principles of modern bee-keeping for young readers. f the bee. It is absolutely perfection in everyway, in plan and architecture, in material andstrength, and in fitness for its purpose. Take a piece of comb like that illustrated on thenext page, and the first thing which we notice is theshape of the cells, that they are six-sided, or hex-agons, all fitting in close together. And then, if it isa nice thin piece of clean comb, and we hold it up tothe light, we shall see very plainly that the cells onone side do n
. A book about bees. Their history, habits, and instincts; together with the first principles of modern bee-keeping for young readers. f the bee. It is absolutely perfection in everyway, in plan and architecture, in material andstrength, and in fitness for its purpose. Take a piece of comb like that illustrated on thenext page, and the first thing which we notice is theshape of the cells, that they are six-sided, or hex-agons, all fitting in close together. And then, if it isa nice thin piece of clean comb, and we hold it up tothe light, we shall see very plainly that the cells onone side do not correspond with the cells on theother, but just the reverse—the centre of any cell onone side corresponding with the spot where the sideso< three cells on the other side meet together. Then, if we cut away all the cells carefully andgradually, we shall find that we have, left in our hand,not a smooth piece of wax, such as would make the COMBS, AND THE FORM OF CELLS. 91 bottom of each cell quite flat, but a piece of thin wax,beautifully impressed with little diamond-shapedpieces put together, the bottom of each cell being. ^TX% Comb—Worker and Drone. formed of three such diamond-shaped pieces meetingin a point, as }ou see in the drawing below. /^ili-^iljL3 53[i3L5t K L^WJ^L Ni^-iM ^-llij .•HiiiT ?^Jli ilil A3b <^%?3^%?1C^^ X3B Comb Foundation. And now, let us try and see how nothing canbe more perfect than all this for the object in view. 92 COMBS, AND THE FORM OF CELLS. First, then, we can easily understand that that formand make of cell will be best which economises tothe greatest degree space, material, time and labour—all of which are very valuable to the bees—and alsoprovides for the combs being the strongest possible,consistent with other requirements. They must also,at the same time, hold as much honey as possible, andbe fitted, when required, for the rearing of the youngbees. Here are a number of conditions to be fulfilled;and it is most interesting to
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Keywords: ., bo, bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, booksubjectbees, bookyear1886
