That this senseless and wickedly wasteful custom should have been almost universal among bee-men up to comparatively recent times is sufficiently a matter for wonder; but that the practice should still survive in certain country districts to-day well-nigh passes belief. If the art of bee-driving—a simple and easy method by which all the bees in a full hive may be transferred unhurt to an empty one, and that within a few minutes—were a new discovery, the thing might be condoned as all of a piece with the general benightedness of mediæval folk. But bee-driving was known, and openly advocated, by several writers on apiculture at least a hundred years ago. By this method, just as easy as the old and cruel one, not only do the entire stores of each hive fall into the undisputed possession of the bee-master, but he retains the colony of bees complete and unharmed for future service. He has secured all the golden eggs, and the goose is still alive.
Those who desire to make a start in beemanship inexpensively might do worse than adopt a practice which the writer has followed for many years past. As soon as the time for the bee-burners’ work arrives, a bicycle is rigged up with a bamboo elongation fore and aft. From this depend a number of straw skeps tied over with cheese-cloth. A bee-smoker and a set of driving-irons complete the equipment, and there is no more to do than sally forth into the country in search of condemned bees.
It is usually not difficult to persuade the cottage apiarist to let you operate on his hives. As soon as he learns that all you ask for your trouble is the bees, while you undertake to leave him the entire honey-crop and a pour-boire into the bargain, he readily gives you access to his stalls. The work before you is now surprisingly simple. A few strong puffs of smoke into the entrance of the hive under manipulation will effectually subdue the bees. Then the hive is lifted, turned over, and placed mouth upwards in any convenient receptacle—a pail or bucket will do, and will hold it as firmly as need be. Your own travelling-gear now comes into use. One of the empty skeps is fitted over the inverted hive. The two are pinned together with an ordinary meat-skewer at one point, and then the skep is prised up and fixed on each side with the driving-irons, so that the whole looks like a box with the lid half-raised. Now you have merely to take up a position in front of the two hives, and begin a steady gentle thumping on the lower one with the palms of the hands.
At first, as the combs begin to vibrate, nothing but chaos and bewilderment are observable among the bees. For a moment or two they run hither and thither in obvious confusion. But presently they seem to get an inkling of what is required of them, and then follows one of the most interesting, not to say fascinating, sights in the whole domain of bee-craft. Evidently the bees arrive at a common agreement that the foundations of their old home have become, from some mysterious cause or other, undermined and perilous; and the word goes forth that the stronghold must be abandoned without more ado. On what initiation the manœuvre is started has never been properly ascertained; but in a little while an ordered discipline seems to spread throughout the erstwhile distracted multitude. In one solid hurrying phalanx the bees begin to sweep up into the empty skep. Once fairly on the march, the process is soon completed. In eight or ten minutes at most, the entire colony hangs in a dense compact cluster from the roof of your hive. Below, brood-combs and honey-combs are alike entirely deserted. There is nothing left for you to do now but carefully to detach the uppermost skep: replace the cheese-cloth, thus securing your prisoners for their journey to their new home; and to set about driving the next stock.
CHAPTER XXXI
EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN HIVE
The bee-master, explaining to an interested novice the wonders of the modern bar-frame hive, often finds himself confronted by a very awkward question. He is at no loss for words, so long as he confines himself to an enumeration of the hive’s many advantages over the ancient straw skep—its elastic brood and honey chambers, its movable combs interchangeable with all other hives in the garden, its power of doubling and trebling both the number of worker-bees in a colony and the amount of harvested honey; above all, its control over sanitation and the breeding of unnecessary drones. But when he is asked the question: Who invented this hive which has brought about such a revolution in bee-craft? his eloquence generally comes to a dead stop. Perhaps one in a hundred of skilled modern bee-keepers is able to answer the query. But the ninety-nine will tell you the bar-frame hive had no single inventor; it came to its latter-day perfection by little and little—the conglomerate result of years of experience and the working of many minds.
This is, of course, as true of the modern bee-hive as it is of all other appliances of world-wide utility. But it is equally true that everything must have had a prime inception at some time, and through some special human agency or other; and, in the case of the bar-frame hive, the honours appear to be pretty equally divided between two personages widely separated in the world’s history—Samson and Sir Christopher Wren.
Perhaps these two names have never before been bracketed together either in or out of print; yet that the association is not a fanciful, but in all respects a natural and necessary one will not be difficult to prove.
The story of how Samson, albeit unconsciously, first gave the idea of the movable comb-frame to an English bee-master is probably new to most apiarians. As to whether the cloud of insects which Samson saw about the carcase of the dead lion were honey-bees or merely drone-flies, we need not here pause to determine. We are concerned for the moment only with one modern explanation of the incident. This is that, although honey-bees abominate carrion in general, in this particular case the carcase had been so dried and emptied and purified by the sun and usual scavenging agencies of the desert as to leave nothing but a shell—a very serviceable makeshift for a bee-hive, in fact—consisting of the tanned skin stretched over the ribs of the lion.