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.
[Picture: “Ancient cottage ruin showing recesses for hives”]
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.
* * * * *
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* * * * *
A New English Classic
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* * * * *
THE LORE
OF THE HONEY-BEE
BY
TICKNER EDWARDES
* * * * *
_OPINIONS OF THE PRESS_
“An eminently readable book . . . admirably illustrated, not unworthy
to rank beside the masterpiece of Maurice Maeterlinck.”—_Times_.
“It must, of course, sound like grossly exaggerated praise if one
says that a book has appeared in the hustled crowd of
twentieth-century volumes which is a worthy successor to Gilbert
White’s ‘Natural History of Selborne,’ but the interest, charm, and
‘personality’ of Mr Edwardes’ work tempt one to class him among the
rare masters of that most difficult art which preserves the perfume
of country joys in printers’ ink.”—_World_.
“A wholly charming book that should become a classic. Nothing quite
so good, or written with such complete literary skill, has appeared
from an English printing-press for long enough. . . . It deserves a
place upon the select bookshelf that holds ‘The Compleat Angler’ and
George Herbert’s ‘Temple’”—_County Gentleman_.
“A work of quite extraordinary interest.”—_Spectator_.
“A wonderful story . . . told with great charm, and much delicate
literary art.”—_Daily Telegraph_.
“A fascinating tale. . . . Quite into the front rank of writers
steps Mr Edwardes, who, in ‘The Lore of the Honey-Bee’ gives us a
book which, while full of information, is worth reading for its
literary charm alone.”—_Daily Mail_.
“A volume which shows up the life of the bee in fresh and brilliant
facets—a book which every bee-lover will cherish.”—_Glasgow News_.
“All the virtues of Maeterlinck’s well-known prose epic, without its
failings . . . Every page is intensely interesting. . . . The book
is embellished with twenty-four of the clearest and best photographs
of bee economy that we have seen.”—_Daily News_.
“A lively and informing book . . . the many illustrations well
chosen, and all good . . . Mr Tickner Edwardes has done nothing so
good as this.”—_Daily Chronicle_.
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FOOTNOTES.
{43} Before the War.