The bee-keeper who wishes to work for honey-in-the-comb uses the rack of sections. This consists of a light wooden rack, usually made to contain twenty-one little wooden boxes called sections, each of which when finished by the bees will contain about one pound of honey-comb (E in the illustration). The section (A) is cleverly cut from one strip of wood, which has three V-shaped cuts across it to form the corners, and is dovetailed at each end, so that it can be folded up very easily by the bee-keeper, something after the style of the outer case of a match-box. In the figure are shown a section in the flat and the same when folded (A, B).
THE EVOLUTION OF A SECTION OF HONEY-COMB.
B, C.—The work of the bee-keeper.
D, E.—The work of the bees in the hive.
A starter of comb-foundation is as necessary for sections as it is for frames, otherwise the bees might build the honey-comb across the sections, joining them all together, and necessitating cutting the combs to get them apart. For this purpose a saw cut is generally made in the top bar of each section in which a strip of a specially thin description of foundation, called super foundation, is inserted (C).
The sections are placed in the section-rack in seven rows, each row consisting of three sections. Between each row a thin sheet of tin or wood, called a separator, is placed. The object of the separators is to ensure the face of the combs being flat, the bees leaving a uniform space of about a quarter of an inch between the separator and the face of the comb. The sections are held in place by means of a dummy-board and spring at the end of the last row.
The rack of sections is now ready to be placed upon the stock-box. You will notice that openings are cut in the edges of the top and bottom bars of the sections. The openings in the bottom bar are to enable the bees to gain access to the sections from the frames below. Often the end bars are similarly cut; when this is so the bees can travel from section to section in the rack.
RACK OF SECTIONS.
To prevent the queen bee from going up into the super to deposit eggs in the combs which are intended to receive honey only, it will be necessary to place a queen-excluder between the stock-box and the rack of sections. The queen-excluder is a sheet of zinc which is perforated all over with holes; these are large enough to admit the workers, but just too small to let the queen pass through.