Manual of the apiary

by Albert John Cook

HISTORY.

For more than twenty years the Germans have used impressed sheets of wax as a foundation for comb, as it was first made by Herr Mehring, in 1857. These sheets are four or five times as thick as the partition at the centre of natural comb, which is very thin, only 1-180 of an inch thick. This is pressed between metal plates so accurately formed that the wax receives rhomboidal impressions which are a fac simile of the basal wall or partition between the opposite cells of natural comb. The thickness of this sheet is no objection, as it is found that the bees almost always thin it down to the natural thickness, and probably use the shavings to form the walls.