[sqkcrk]

Being as queens will and can lay eggs in any cell in the comb, I see no distinction between brood comb and storage cells. It's a matter of what each cell is currently being used for at the time.

psfred, by size I mean bore, not depth. I may be wrong, but small cell does not refer to depth, does it?

 

[sqkcrk]

MrHappy,
I think what is happening w/ the drone comb building you refer to is that in an established colony of bees when a hole occurs for some reason or other, such as mouse damage, for some reason unknown to me bees will more often than not fill that space w/ drone comb.

Interestingly you will find that if you make a nuc w/ a queencell or set one up to raise its own queen, almost always any hole will be filled w/ worker cell sized comb. I have a friend who used to spend part of his winter going thru combs which he intended to use for spring nucs cutting out drone comb, sometimes just knocking out all the comb in a frame leaving the wires.

 

[sqkcrk]

Mark, have you read this?

http://www.beesource.com/point-of-v...-influence-of-size-of-brood-cell-upon-the-size-and-variability-of-the-honeybee/

No. And for some reason I can't access the Study when I click on it.

 

[sqkcrk]

I'll try again.

All the links to the parts of the paper are on the left nav. Scroll down.

 

[sqkcrk]

Interesting. I was not aware of the variability of cell size w/in a beehive. Have beetrees been disected and cells measured throughout the different parts of the combs to verify these differences?

 

[sqkcrk]

Wouldn't what Huber states mean that some cells would be made larger at the expense of other cells?

 

[sqkcrk]

I have never measured cell size, but I am under the impression that the common way of measuring is to measure the distance across a set of cells, say 10, outside to outside and divide by the number of cells measured.

If measuring bore, wouldn't one use a set of inside calipers?

 

[sqkcrk]

Aren't cocoons cleaned out of the cells?

 

[sqkcrk]

Makes sense. I almost wrote it that way, but didn't.

I don't understand the bore measuring you describe. Why wouldn't you simply measure the inside dimension and not have to do any math to determine bore size?

 

[sqkcrk]

Am not sure what that means.

 

[sqkcrk]

I guess if I were measuring the average bore size of worker cells, I would measure the inside dimension, the bore, of a number of cells, at least ten and then do the math to attain the average.

I'm confused. Does measuring 10 cells tell one whether the cells are small cell size or not? What's the small cell per inch or mm ratio?

Is bore an important measure or am I just muddying the waters in my mind?

 

[sqkcrk]

Prolly.

No, I have not measured cells at all. Maybe I shouldn't be asking about it.

 

[sqkcrk]

I see. Thanks.