The ABC of bee culture: a cyclopaedia of every thing pertaining to the care of the honey-bee; bees, honey, hives, implements, honey-plants, etc., facts gleaned from the experience of thousands of bee keepers all over our land, and afterward verified by practical work in our own apiary . A< Let E B F II represent the cube, and thedotted lines the pyramids. If the pyramidsare so made that the line AD is a straight,continuous one, it is evident, by a little re-flection, that the angles A and D will beright angles. If this is so, A D is exactlyequal to E F, the point we were to , refer
The ABC of bee culture: a cyclopaedia of every thing pertaining to the care of the honey-bee; bees, honey, hives, implements, honey-plants, etc., facts gleaned from the experience of thousands of bee keepers all over our land, and afterward verified by practical work in our own apiary . A< Let E B F II represent the cube, and thedotted lines the pyramids. If the pyramidsare so made that the line AD is a straight,continuous one, it is evident, by a little re-flection, that the angles A and D will beright angles. If this is so, A D is exactlyequal to E F, the point we were to , referring to the former figure, if weshould go on building these pyramids on allsides of the cube, we will have the beautifulgeometrical figure called the rhombic do-decahedron • it is so called, because it is asolid figui-e having ]2 equal sides, and eachside is a rhomb, or lozenge, such as we havedescribed. Where the obtuse angles ofthree of these rhombs meet, as at C, we shallhave the exact figure of the bottom of ahoney-comb cell. A picture of the geomet-rical solid we have mentioned is RHOMBIC DODECAHEDRON. How does it come that the bees havesolved so exactly this intricate problem, andknow in just what form and shape theirprecious wax can be used, so as to hold themost honey, with the very least expenditureof labor and material? Some are contentwith saying that they do it by instinct, andlet it drop there ; but I believe God has giv-en us something farther to do than to in-vent names for things, and then let themdrop. By carefully studying the differenthives in a large apiary, we see that not all of them build comb precisely alike, and notall colonies are equally skilled in workingwax down to this wonderful thinness. Somebees will waste their precious moments—and wax—in making great, awkward li^mpsof wax ; coarse, irregular cells ; crooked, un-even comb, etc., with very bad economyeither for the production of brood or for thestoring of honey ; while others w
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1880, booksubjectbeecult, bookyear1884
