Country wanderings towards the end of summer, even now when the twentieth century is two decades old, still bring to light many ancient and curious things. Within an hour of London, and side by side with the latest agricultural improvements, you can still see corn coming down to the old reaping-hook, still watch the plough-team of bullocks toiling over the hillside, still get that unholy whiff of sulphur in the bee-gardens where the old-fashioned skeppists are “taking up” their bees.
Burning-time came round usually towards the end of August, sooner or later according to the turn of the season. The bee-keeper went the round of his hives, choosing out the heaviest and the lightest stocks. The heaviest hives were taken because they contained most honey; the lightest because, being short of stores, they were unlikely to survive the winter, and had best be put to profit at once for what they were worth. Thus a complete reversal of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest was artificially brought about by the old bee-masters. The most vigorous strains of bees were carefully weeded out year by year, and the perpetuation of the race left to those stocks which had proved themselves malingerers and half-hearts.
There was also another way in which this system worked wholly for the bad. If a hive of bees reached burning-time with a fully charged storehouse, it was probably due to the fact that the stock had cast no swarm that year, and had, therefore, preserved its whole force of workers for honey-getting. Under the light of modern knowledge, any stall of bees that showed a lessened tendency towards swarming would be carefully set aside, and used as the mother-hive for future generations; for this habit of swarming, necessary under the old dispensation, is nothing else than a fatal drawback under the new. The scientific bee-master of to-day, with his expanding brood-chambers and his system of supplying his hives artificially with young and prolific queens every third year, has no manner of use for the old swarming-habit. It serves but to break up and hopelessly to weaken his stocks just when he has got them to prime working fettle. Although the honey-bee still clings to this ancient impulse, there is no doubt that selective cultivation will ultimately evolve a race of bees in which the swarming-fever shall have been much abated, if not wholly extinguished; and then the problem of cheap English honey will have been solved. But in ancient times the bee-gardens were replenished only from those hives wherein the swarming-fever was most rampant. The old bee-keepers, in consigning all their heavy stocks to the sulphur-pit, unconsciously did their best to exterminate all non-swarming strains.
The bee-burning took place about sunset, or as soon as the last honey-seekers were home for the night. Small circular pits were dug in some quiet corner hard by. These were about six or eight inches deep, and a handful of old rags that had been dipped in melted brimstone having been put in, the bee-keeper went to fetch the first hive. The whole fell business went through in a strange solemnity and quietude. A knife was gently run round under the edge of the skep, to free it from its stool, and the hive carefully lifted and carried, mouth downwards, towards the sulphur-pit, none of the doomed bees being any the wiser. Then the rag was ignited and the skep lowered over the pit. An angry buzzing broke out as the fumes reached the undermost bees in the cluster, but this quickly died down into silence. In a minute or two every bee had perished, and the pit was ready for the next hive.
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.
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.
In the summer of 1834 a certain Major Munn was walking among his hives, pondering the ancient Bible narrative, when a sudden brilliant idea occurred to him. Like most advanced bee-keepers of his day, he had long grown dissatisfied with the straw hive, and his bees were housed in square wooden boxes. But these, although more lasting, were nearly as unmanageable as the skeps. The bees built their combs within them on just the same haphazard plan; and, once built, the combs were fixed permanently to the tops of the boxes. Now, the idea which had occurred to Major Munn was simply this: He reflected that the combs built by the bees in the dry shell of the lion-skin were probably attached each to one of the encircling ribs; so that, when Samson took the honey-comb, all he need have done was to remove a rib, bringing the attached comb away with it. Thereupon Major Munn set to work to make a hive on the rib-plan, which was composed of a number of wooden frames standing side by side, each to contain a comb and each removable at will. Since that time numberless small and great improvements have been devised; but, in its essence, the modern hive is no more than the dried lion-skin distended by the ribs, as Samson found it on that day when he went on his fateful mission of wooing.
The part played by Sir Christopher Wren in the evolution of the bar-frame hive, though not so romantic, was fraught with almost equal significance to modern bee-craft. Movable comb-frames were as yet undreamed of in Wren’s time, nearly two hundred years before Major Munn invented them. But Wren seems to have been the discoverer of a principle just as important. This was what latter-day bee-keepers call “storification.” Wren’s hive consisted of a series of wooden boxes, octagonal in shape, placed one below the other, with inter-communicating doors, and glass windows in the sides of each section. Up to that date bee-hives had been merely single receptacles made of straw, plastered wattles, or wood. When the stock had outgrown its dwelling there was nothing for it but to swarm. But by the device of adding another story below the first one, when this was crowded with bees, and a third or even a fourth if necessary, Wren was able to make his hive grow with the growth of his bee-colony or contract with its post-seasonal decline. He had, in fact, invented the elastic brood-chamber, which alone enables the bee-master to put in practice the one cardinal maxim of successful bee-keeping—the production of strong stocks.
Wren’s octagon storifying hive seems to have been plagiarised by most eminent bee-masters of his day and after with the naïve dishonesty so characteristic among bee-men of the time. Thorley’s hive is obviously taken from, indeed, is probably identical with, that of Wren. The hive made and sold by Moses Rusden, King Charles II.’s bee-master, is of almost exactly the same pattern, but it is described as manufactured under the patent of one John Geddie. This patent was taken out by Geddie in 1675, and Geddie would appear to be the arch-purloiner of the whole crew. For it is quite certain that, having had one of Wren’s hives shown to him, he was not content with merely copying it, but actually went and patented the principle as his own idea.
But Wren’s hive, good as it was in comparison with the single-chambered straw skep or wooden box, still lacked one vital element. Although he and his imitators had realised the advantage of an expanding bee-hive, this was secured only by the process of “nadiring,” or adding room below. Thus the upper part of Wren’s hive always contained the oldest and dirtiest combs, and as bees almost invariably carry their stores upwards, the production of clear, uncontaminated honey under this system was impossible. It remained for a Scotsman, Robert Kerr, of Stewarton, in Ayrshire, to perfect, some hundred and fifty years later, what Wren had so ingeniously begun.
Whether Kerr—or “Bee Robin,” as he was called by his neighbours—ever saw or heard of hives on Sir Christopher Wren’s plan has never been ascertained. But plagiarism was in the air throughout those far-off times, and there is no reason to think Kerr better than his fellows. In any case, the “Stewarton” hive, like Wren’s, was octagon in shape, and had several stories; but these stories were added above as well as below. By placing his empty boxes first underneath the original brood-chamber, to stimulate increase of population, and then, when the honey-flow began, placing more boxes above to receive the surplus honey, “Bee Robin” succeeded in getting some wonderful harvests. His big supers, full of snow-white virgin honey-comb, were soon the talk of Glasgow, where he readily sold them. Imitators sprang up far and near, and it is only within the last twenty-five or thirty years that his hives can be said to have fallen into desuetude.
But probably his success was due not more to his invention of the expanding honey-chamber than to two other important innovations which he effected in bee-craft. The octagonal boxes of Wren had fixed tops with a central hole, much like the straw hive still used by the old-fashioned bee-keepers to this day. “Bee Robin” did away with these fixed tops, and substituted a number of parallel wooden bars from which the combs were suspended, the spaces between the bars being filled by slides withdrawable at will. He could thus, after having added a story to his honey-chamber, allow the bees access to it by withdrawing his slides from the outside: and when the super was filled with honey-comb, the slides were again employed in shutting off communication, whereupon the super could be easily removed.
This, however, though it greatly facilitated the work of the bee-master, did not account for the large yields of surplus honey, which the “Stewarton” hive first made possible. In the light of modern bee-knowledge, it is plain that a big honey-harvest can only be secured by a corresponding large stock of bees, and Robert Kerr seems to have been the originator of what was nothing less than a revolution in the craft. Hitherto the bee-keeper had estimated his wealth according to the number of his hives, and the more these subdivided by swarming, the more prosperous their owner accounted himself. But “Bee Robin” reversed all this. He housed his swarms not singly, but always two at a time; and he made large stocks out of small ones by the simple expedient of piling the brood-boxes of several colonies together. In a word, it was the “Dreadnought” principle applied to the peaceful traffic of the hives.