MillerThousand AnswersBeekeepingQuestions.pdf - BioBees

22 DR. MILLER Sthen in the morning you will not forget to take out the waxbefore building the fire.Then you scrape the dirt from the bottom ui the cake,which you can do more easily while the cake is a little warm.With a large amount of such scrapings it may be worth while tomelt the whole to get out the little wax in it, but with a smallamount it is not worth the trouble.Q. Is beeswax injured by coming to a boil? If so, can it bedetected that the wax has been boiled?A. Bringing to a boil will hardly hurt it if not repeated toomuch, nor continued too long, and I don't believe the short boilingcould bedetected.Q. Will a brass or copper vessel injure the quality of the wax?A. I think not. Iron will darken it.Q. How many pounds of honey does it take to make onepound of wax?A. For a long time it was counted 20 pounds. Then some figuredit out 7 pounds or less. Possibly 10 or 12 pounds may not befarout of the way.Beeswax, Rendering (See Combs, Rendering.)Bee Supplies, Ordering.—Q. I have 12 colonies of bees in goodmovable-frame hives. I am a beginner. What shall I order inthe way of supplies? I wish to run for comb honey and increaseby natural swarming. I have nothing in the way of tools, andmy time is limited, as I am a rural mail carrier.A. It is not an easy thing to tell what anyone needs withoutpretty full particulars as to harvest and conditions. In generalterms I should say that you should have on hand enough sectionsall ready in supers in advance, so that you can give to the bees asmany as they would fill in the best season you have ever known,and then an extra one for each colony besides. Possibly youhave had so little experience that you don't know what the beeswould do in the very best kind of a season. Well, then, we mightguess that in the very best kind of a year you would get an averageof 125 sections per colony, although that may be putting itpretty low if you are in a good location. If your supers hold 24sections each, as a good many supers do, it would take about fivesupers to hold the 124 sections, as we don't need to be so exactabout it. But some colonies will fill more than the five, and someless ;you can't hold them to the e.xact number, and at the last therewill necessarily be more or less unfinished sections on the hives