48 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 
their remarkable systems and policies. In all 
likelihood the bee-masters, the practical men who 
owned the hives, had much the same shrewd 
faculty of leaving things alone in far-off times as 
we observe among the skeppists of the last genera- 
tion. In many ways, what they did at last come 
to do they did ill, notably in the apparently 
insane practice of destroying the bees to obtain 
the honey. But even this was not so foolish a 
procedure as it appears to-day. It was a plain 
matter of business, according to the lights of the 
time. Their process was to condemn to the sulphur- 
pit all the lightest and the heaviest of their stocks. 
Experience taught them that the weak colonies 
stood little chance of getting through the winter 
unless they were artificially fed ; while if the bees 
of the large colonies were preserved, after being 
robbed of their stores, they would need the same 
provision. It wasa matter ofarithmetic. Artificial 
feeding was then a much more costly affair than 
it is to-day, and the reckoning came out well on 
the side of slaughter. The worst part of the 
business, so far as modern scientific bee-breeders 
are concerned, is that the old system of destruc- 
tion tended to preserve only those strains of 
bees who were inveterate swarmers; while the 
steady, industrious stay-at-homes, who accumu- 
lated the largest stores of honey, were invari- 
ably exterminated. This is a fateful legacy to 
have passed on, when we consider that one of 
