132 AUSTRALIAN BEE LORE AND BEE CULTURE 



CHAPTER XXII. 



THE HISTORICAL BEE-HIVE— ITS EVOLUTION. 



"Make your cage before you get your bird" is a proverb very 

 applicable to amateur bee-keepers.* I have always advocated 

 that spare bives should be on hand and in position to receive any 

 stray swarm that may chance put in an appearance. No matter 

 how small it may be, it is always more or less valuable if only to 

 strengthen a weak colony. The object of these pages is to give 

 instruction as far as can be on paper, not to professional bee- 

 keepers, but to beginners and would-be bee-keepers of the "back- 

 blocks" and other remote places where carriage an3 other con- 

 comitant troubles are always more or less standing in the way of 

 newly fledged and enthusiastic amateur apiarists. 



Artificial homes and habitations for bees, like those of man, 

 have had their periods and architectural developments and changes 

 from the first primitive type to the more or less perfect movable 

 bar-frame hives of almost universal adoption. Like man, too, 

 bees were once "cave dwellers," and indeed wild bees still are. 

 Whilst man led a nomadic life he was content with the "wild 

 honey" that was found "dripping from the rocks." In those 

 early times there was no occasion to construct artificial homes for 

 the domestication of the bee till man himself became a settler on 

 the soil. The development of an artificial home for bees has been 

 very slow. Some of the earliest history of civilization is silent 

 thereon. Nevertheless, artificial homes for bees "are as old as the 

 hills." The artificial beehives used in Egypt at the present day 

 are sun-dried earthen tubes, about 4 feet long, similar to unglazed 

 drain-pipes. The same style of hive is said to be the one adopted 

 by the Japanese, and also among the hill tribes of Northern India. 

 From these sun-dried clay-pots of the ancients to the old straw 

 hives of our great grandmothers, architectural progress was very 

 slow. 



"He was a sound philosopher who first shaped it and gave it utterance, and 

 the proverb is now as familiar to us as household words. 



