RURAL INDUSTRIES. 125 



They assemWe from the more extensive regions according to the greater size of the 

 cedar plantation itself and the tetter the crop. Crops do not happen every year. On an aver- 

 age the nut ripens once in two years, hut frequently the harvests are so insignificant that 

 cedar groves that are at all remote do not attract any traders. Good harvests generally do 

 not occur more often than once in four or five years, and excellent harvests happen once 

 in ten to filteen years. In the gathering of the nut a division of labour is commonly practised. 

 The fir cone is plucked from the cedar by the strong, skilful workmen called 1 a z o k s or 

 climbers. They throw the fir cones on the ground where they are picked up by others, mostly 

 youths and women. With a good harvest, a lazok and his two or three helpers will gather thirty 

 to fifty pouds of nuts, or when the harvest is exceptional, one hundred pouds or more. la 

 the Tobolsk government the harvests are not so great as further to the east. But as the nut 

 sells in the government of Tobolsk much dearer, the earnings are about the same in all the 

 Siberian governments, the relative crop being the same also. A lazok gets 50 to 100 roubles 

 from an average harvest, and 200 to 250 roubles and more from an exceptional one. One 

 such harvest sometimes leads to the prolonged improvement of the economical condition of 

 that part of the population which has chanced to avail itself of it. 



Among the forest industries in Siberia must also be referred bee keeping, which is fairly 

 developed throughout the Altai mining district and in the nearest parts of the remaining dis- 

 tricts of the Tomsk government. Bee keeping in Siberia is carried on with the help of hives 

 of very simple construction called b o r t s, hollowed out of thick trees. The bees are bred in 

 the woods, and receive no artificial food, but feed themselves en the plants and bushes flour- 

 ishing in the taiga. The dimensions of these bee farms are very various. Some beemasters 

 own not more than three to live hives while others possess from five hundred to a thousand, and 

 more. The average size of a peasant's bee garden in the localities where the industry is most 

 highly developed, namely in the groups of settlements lying on the very edge of the taiga, 

 may be taken as seventy-five to a hundred hives. In such places the number of beemasters 

 forms a third, half or more of the total householders. The extent of bee keeping has now con- 

 siderably diminished compared with what it was fifteen or twenty years ago. Not a few bee 

 gardens have ceased to exist, and in those that remain the number of hives has diminished 

 by half or more. Two causes lie at the root of this state of things, bad harvests of bee food, 

 and diseases of the insects themselves. Numbers of hives perished altogether, while others 

 began to yield much less honey. Formerly each hive gave not less than an average of one 

 pond of honey, while half the quantity is now considered a very good yield. 



The forest again is the arena of a whole series of industries, where nature gives man 

 not a finished or almost finished product as in the cases above, but only a material, upon 

 which he must expend his labour. Here first and foremost comes the hewing of timber and 

 especially the cutting of wood fuel. The regions where these industries are most developed 

 are scattered over all Siberia, being concentrated in the neighbourhood of the more consider- 

 able towns and along the navigable and raftable rivers. Thus Tomsk is surrounded with a 

 region containing about fifteen thousand souls, where the preparation of wood fuel for the 

 town population is one of the chief sources of livelihood. Similar districts encircle Tinmen, 

 Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, although these towns receive the greater part of the timber and wood 

 they require by ral'tage froui comparatively distant localities. 



