[CHAPTER VI.]
INVERTED-HIVE.
Many useful discoveries have been made by accident;—and to some of the greatest and grandest of those discoveries even philosophers and men of science have been led by accidents apparently the most trifling and insignificant.
To the playful tricks of some little children that astonishing and most scientific instrument—the telescope, it is said, owes its origin; and it is said also that that great and good man—Sir Isaac Newton was led to investigate the laws of gravitation by accidentally observing an apple topple to the ground from the twig that had borne it. One of the sweetest of our poets, however, informs us—that
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee,
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see.
If, therefore, a beautifully delicate honey-comb suspended from the stool of a hive first led me to discover the utility of ventilation in a colony of Bees, though there may be nothing very surprising, there is, I trust,—nay, I am convinced, and therefore I assert—there is something very useful in it: and if an accident of another description induced me to endeavour to turn it to advantage, there is nothing to be greatly wondered at. So, however, it happened; and here follows the account of it.
On rising early one morning in July 1827, and walking into my apiary, as my custom then was, and still is, I discovered that some malicious wretch had been there before me, and had overturned a fine colony of Bees. The reader may judge how much my indignation was aroused by that dastardly act of outrage against my unoffending Bees. My feelings of vexation soon, however, subsided into those of pity for my poor Bees; and fortunately for them, no less than for me, their overturned domicil, which consisted of a hive eked or enlarged by a square box upon which I had placed it some weeks previously, was so shaded from or towards the east by a thick fence, that the rays of the sun had not reached it;—this compound-hive, and the countless thousands that were clustering around it, were prostrate in the shade. I viewed my distressed Bees for a considerable time, and studied and planned what I might best do to relieve them, and, if possibly I could, rescue them from the deplorable situation into which they had been thrown. At length I determined to reverse the whole, which I effected by first carefully drawing the box as closely as I was able to the edge of the hive, and then placing the hive upon its crown, so that, in fact, the whole domicil was inverted. I shaded, protected, shored-up, and supported the Bees, their exposed works, and their hive, in the best way I could, and afterwards reluctantly left them for the day, being under the necessity of going from home a distance of almost twenty miles, viz. to Wisbech. On my return in the evening I could discern evident proofs of the willingness of the Bees to repair the sore injury they had sustained; and on the third day afterwards I was highly pleased to witness the progress their united efforts had made to rescue their dilapidated habitation from the ruin that had threatened it and them too, and which, I confess, I had anticipated. I was particularly attentive to their movements. I assisted them by every means I could devise. They gradually surmounted all the difficulties to which they had been exposed. In short, they prospered; and from that malicious trick of some miscreant or other I first caught the idea of an inverted-hive, which I have since studied and greatly improved.
Every Bee-master will have had opportunities of observing—that this curious, I may say—intelligent, little insect—the Bee, is ever alive to the most ready methods of extricating itself from difficulties, and of bettering the condition of the state, whenever accident or misfortune has placed it in jeopardy: and, I will add—that the timely assistance of the Bee-master will frequently save a stock from that ruin, or at least from that trouble and inconvenience, which apparently trivial circumstances, such for instance as uncleanliness, excessive heat in summer, intense severity of winter, too contracted an entrance at one season, a too extended and open one at another, or wet lodged on and retained by the floor-board, may, and very often do occasion.
The subjoined cut is a representation of an INVERTED-HIVE fixed in its frame, trellised, roofed, completely fitted up, and just as it appears when placed in an apiary and stocked with Bees.