For comb-honey production the brood chamber should be of such a size that by proper management it may be well filled with brood at the beginning of the honey flow, so that the brood and surplus apartments maybe definitely separated. A brood chamber may be considered too large if by proper management it is not on an average fairly well filled with brood at the beginning of the honey flow, and too small if it provides an average of less room than the colony is able to occupy with brood previous to the honey flow. Unless the beekeeper practices feeding, a brood chamber that does not contain sufficient room for both winter stores and brood rearing during late summer and autumn may also be considered too small. It may be well to note that by this standard if the brood chamber seems to be too large the fault may lie in the management during the previous autumn, winter, or spring. Of course the brood chamber that is barely large enough for one colony will be too large for another in the same apiary or the character of the season may be such that all brood chambers may be too large for best results one season and too small the next, so an average must be sought. While by manipulation good results may be secured by the use of any of the sizes in common use, any great departure in either direction from the size best suited to conditions of a given locality necessitates an excessive increase in labor to give best results. There is at the present time a strong tendency toward the use of the 10-frame hive body as a medium-sized brood chamber which may be used as a unit of a larger elastic brood chamber when necessary.
Fig. 2.—Perforated zinc queen excluder. (From Phillips.)
The comb-honey producer is more exacting as to certain details of construction of hives than is the producer of extracted honey since it is more necessary for him to handle individual brood frames during the honey flow. The spaces[1] above and between the top bars of the brood frames must be accurate or they will be bridged with burr and brace combs and these filled with honey. Burr and brace combs make the removal and readjustment of the super and the manipulation of frames a slow and disagreeable task, to say nothing of the waste of material, which should have been placed in the sections in the beginning. The use of the slatted honey board ([fig. 2]), while preventing brace combs between itself and the super, does not prevent the building of burr and brace combs between and above the top bars of the frames. This trouble is largely eliminated by proper spacing. Most hive manufacturers are at present making the top bars of the brood frames of such a width that the spaces between them is from one-fourth to five-sixteenths inch with the same spacing above them. The difficulty, however, is in maintaining this spacing with any great degree of accuracy. Self-spacing frames[2] are a partial solution of this difficulty. In some localities, however, the ordinary self-spacing frames are so badly propolized as to render their removal from the brood chamber difficult as well as materially to interfere with the proper spacing. The advantages of such frames are then nullified, while their disadvantages are retained or even intensified. In such localities metal spacers having but small surfaces of contact are sometimes used. Some beekeepers prefer omitting the spacers entirely. However, some of the difficulties arising from the use of self-spacing frames are the result of carelessness on the part of the operator in not crowding the frames together properly when closing the hive after having handled the frames.
[1] A bee space, or that space to which bees are least inclined to put comb or propolis, is perhaps a scant one-fourth inch. In hive construction one-fourth or five-sixteenths inch is usually used.
[2] These are so constructed that the end bars are one-fourth or five-sixteenths inch wider than the top bars throughout a portion of their length or furnished with projections of metal fitted to the edges of the frame. In either case the adjustment is such that when the frames are crowded together in the hive the spaces between the top bars will be correct.
SECTIONAL HIVES.
The sectional hive in which the brood chamber is composed of two or more shallow hive bodies, making it horizontally divisible, offers some advantages, especially to the comb-honey specialist. Most of the ordinary manipulations can be performed readily with such hives without removing the frames. One of their greatest advantages in comb-honey production is the rapidity with which the apiarist can examine the colonies for queen cells if natural swarming is to be controlled by manipulation. They are also very elastic, the units or sections usually being of 5-L frame capacity, permitting a brood chamber capacity of 5 or any multiple of 5-L frames. Among the disadvantages of these hives are the extra cost owing to the greater number of parts necessary in their construction and the difficulty in maintaining proper spacing without the use of top bars on the frames heavier than would seem advisable in the middle of the brood nest.