Fig. 60.—Honey shipping-cases. (From Gleanings.)
Notwithstanding such precautions for the prevention of swarming as shading the hives, ventilation, having only young queens, and the removal of the outside combs, substituting for them frames of foundations or starters near the center of the brood nest, swarms will sometimes issue, especially from hives devoted to comb-honey production. The best plan in this case is to hive the swarm in a clean new hive whose frames have been filled with starters and place this on the stand of the parent colony, moving the latter to a new position or more feet away. The swarm in its new quarters will then be joined by the rest of the field workers from the parent hive, and the whole tone, reunited and having for some days no brood to care for, will constitute a strong colony for storing honey. The super of partly finished sections should be lifted, bees and all, from the parent hive and placed on the brood chamber of the new colony.
The supers should be promptly removed at the close of the honey harvest, honey boards with bee escapes in them being used to free them from bees, as described under the head of "Extracting." If the gathering season for the year has also ended, an examination of the brood apartment should be made to determine whether feeding is necessary, either to prolong brood rearing or for winter stores.
PRODUCTION OF WAX.
The progressive apiarist of the present time does not look upon the production of wax in so great a proportion compared with his honey yield as did the old-time box-hive bee keeper. The latter obtained much of his honey for the market by crushing the combs and straining it out, leaving the crushed combs to be melted up for their wax. Before the use of supers late swarms and many colonies quite heavy in honey were smothered by the use of sulphur; the light ones because their honey supply would not bring them through the winter, and the very heavy ones because of the rich yield in honey. Frequent losses of bees in wintering and through queenlessness gave more combs for melting, as without frame hives; honey extractors, or comb-foundation machines, the vacated combs were not often utilized again. The wax from the pressed combs was all marketed, since there could be but little home use for it.
The bee keeper of to-day, after having removed the honey from the combs by centrifugal force, returns them, but slightly injured, to be refilled by the bees, and at the end of the season these combs are stored away for use in successive years, or he secures the surplus, also apart from the brood, in neat sectional boxes, to be marketed as stored—that is, without cutting.
The wax must therefore come from the cappings of combs where extracted honey is produced, from occasional broken comb, bits of drone comb that are cut out to be replaced by worker comb, from unfinished and travel-stained sections from which the honey has been extracted, or from old brood combs that need to be replaced. Since the price per pound of extracted honey is usually not less than one-third and that of comb honey one-half the price of wax, and it has already been indicated (p. 28) that some 12 to 15 pounds of honey may in general be safely reckoned as necessary to produce 1 pound of comb, it can readily be seen that it is much more profitable to turn the working force, in so far as possible, to the production of honey rather than wax, taking only as much wax as can be produced without lowering the yield of honey; and what wax is taken is practically turned into honey the following year, for it is made into comb foundation, which, judiciously used, increases in turn the season's yield of honey.
Wax being so much more valuable than honey, it behooves the bee keeper to save even the smallest pieces of comb; but during warm weather they must not be left long or they will serve as breeding places for the wax moth, unless fumigated with burning sulphur or exposed to the fumes of bisulphide of carbon two or three times each month until no more eggs of the moth remain.
The old way of rendering wax was to put the combs into a sack made of some open stuff', weight this down in a kettle of water, and boil for some time. The wax rose, and when cold was removed in a cake. This process, besides being dauby, often yielded inferior wax—burned, water-soaked, or filled with settlings.
