Peter
Sorry to say, back in the 1880s/1890s many were
experimenting with making artificial foundations and combs,
so more then one size then too was experimented with. Also
Peter, measurements of combs/size of cells were still also
done differently by several countries depending upon who in
control you talked too (this was finally decreed a certain
way to be done I think in Germany after much debate in the
1930s or so, but left differences between the official
scientific new way and the old ways of the field). Also you
need to read conerning the area of inch vs MM measurements
too.

But, what we did was finally just take feral/wild comb
measurements prior to usage of artificial foundations from
as many old archives as we could find and plot them on a
map to see the climatic and latitude/longitude patterns and
how they broke out (took over 3 years just doing this).
First initial map Bee Culture printed (for N. Amerca) while
we were still working on the final more detailed one for
all continents. Then we shook down and went backwards into
the natural spectrum of sizing. First hopefully to 5.0mm
sizing on which our bees lived with mites, but stress and
secondaries still got; and then to correct the secondaries
and retool finer, we went to 4.9mm in the center of the
natural cell sizes/comb sizes to solve our problem, along
with letting the bees acclimitize themselves and sort out,
to see where things bottomed. In other words we looked for
the size first to use being commercial and then the mills.
And getting mills by the way back then wasn't easy, had to
originally make some of my own while talking Toma into
making the 4.9mm for us all thru the middle to late 1980s
up until middle 1990s until we finally got one. 

Respectfully submitted,

Dee A. Lusby
Small Cell Commercial Beekeeper
Moyza, Arizona
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/organicbeekeepers/




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