“This,” he said, “we call super-foundation. It is pure refined wax, rolled into sheets as thin as paper, and milled on both sides with the shapes of the cells. All combs now are built by the bees on this artificial foundation; and there is enough wax here, thin as it is, to make the entire honeycomb. The bees add nothing to it, but simply knead it and draw it out into a comb two inches wide; and so all the time needed for wax-making by the bees is saved just when time is most precious—during the short season of the honey-flow.”
He took down a sheet from another pile close at hand.
“All that thin foundation,” he explained, “is for section-honey, and will be eaten. But this you could not eat. This is brood-foundation, made extra strong to bear the great heat of the lower hive. It is put into the brood-nest, and the cells reared on it are the cradles for the young bees. See how dense and brown it is, and how thick; it is six or seven times as heavy as the other. But it is all pure wax, though not so refined, and is made in the same way, serving the same useful, time-saving purpose.”
We moved on towards the store-rooms, out of the clatter of the machinery.
“It was a great day,” he said, reflectively, “a great day for bee-keeping when foundation was invented. The bee-man who lets his hives work on the old obsolete natural system nowadays makes a hopeless handicap of things. Yet the saving of time and bee-labour is not the only, and is hardly the most important, outcome of the use of foundation. It has done a great deal more than that, for it has solved the very weighty problem of how to keep the number of drones in a hive within reasonable limits.”
He opened the door of a small side-room. From ceiling to floor the walls were covered with deep racks loaded with frames of empty comb, all ready for next season. Taking down a couple of the frames, he brought them out into the light.
“These will explain to you what I mean,” said he. “This first one is a natural-built comb, made without the milled foundation. The centre and upper part, you see, is covered on both sides with the small cells of the worker-brood. But all the rest of the frame is filled with larger cells, and in these only drones are bred. Bees, if left to themselves, will always rear a great many more drones than are needed; and as the drones gather no stores but only consume them in large quantities, a superabundance of the male-bees in a hive must mean a diminished honey-yield. But the use of foundation has changed all that. Now look at this other frame. By filling all brood-frames with worker-foundation, as has been done here, we compel the bees to make only small cells, in which the rearing of drones is almost impossible; and so we keep the whole brood-space in the hive available for the generation of the working bee alone.”