Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/829

Rh for his hive had more practical value than the whole of the others together. In carrying out the common principle, Langstroth was undoubtedly far ahead.

The next stride in advance was the invention of the manufacture of "comb-foundation," which was a great desideratum, as the honey season in the temperate zone is comparatively short, and a new colony of bees supplied with the "comb-foundation" will do as much in two or three days as one alongside of it without the foundation will do in eight or ten days, as the writer has repeatedly proved. Foundation comb is made by pressing sheets of pure bees-wax between metal rollers or plates so constructed as to give to the wax the exact impressions of the cells in the basal wall of the natural comb. This saves the worker-bees just that much labor and time, and they proceed at once to rapidly draw out and develop the incipient cells. The merit of this invention is also somewhat in dispute. Upward of twenty years ago the late eminent apiarist, S, Wagner, patented comb-foundation in the United States; but it soon transpired that Herr Mehring, in Germany, had previously made foundation, and that the Germans had been using it for three or four years. As it is the accumulated wit and experience of the age, rather than the man, that produces the invention, it is quite likely that Mr, Wagner arrived at the idea without the aid of the other German (for Mr. Wagner was himself a German). Montaigne said he "had as clear a right to think Plato's thoughts as Plato himself had"; and the American German had not only as good a right as the home Teuton to think out this invention, but he was just as likely to do so, and more likely, for the inspiriting and inventive Yankee atmosphere would quicken his blood and sharpen his wits.

Recent bee-culture has been also greatly promoted and extended by the specialty of queen-rearing, which has been brought to great perfection on scientific principles. D. A. Jones, in Canada, and Henry Alley, in the United States, have developed this department of apiculture to an extent leaving, one would think, little to be further achieved or desired. As, however, under the progressive laws of evolution, we have ceased to set bounds to improvement in anything not fixed mathematically, we will not say that any department of practical apiculture is yet fully wrought out to perfection.

In order to secure absolute purity of fertilization in the different varieties and sub-varieties in crossing, D. A. Jones, of Beeton, Ontario, has established queen-nurseries on different islands in Georgian Bay, so far from shore and from each other as to secure entire purity of blood in copulation. Queens and drones bred and mated under such circumstances, from pure imported stock, can not be otherwise than pure.

Henry Alley also, of Wenham, Massachusetts, has, through a long series of experiments during many years, successfully applied science to the modus operandi of queen-rearing, and has recently given the