NIGHT ON A HONEY-FARM 61 
stores. While they are making one pound of comb 
they will eat seventeen or eighteen pounds of honey. 
So the man who hit upon the idea of drawing the 
honey from the comb by centrifugal force did a 
splendid thing for modern bee-farming. English 
honey was nothing until the extractor came and 
changed bee-keeping from a mere hobby into an 
important industry. But come and see how the 
thing is done from the beginning.”’ 
He led the way towards one end of the building. 
Here three or four men were at work at a long 
table surrounded by great stacks of honeycombs in 
their oblong wooden frames. The bee-master took 
up one of these. ‘‘ This,’ he explained, ‘is the 
bar-frame just as it comes from the hive. Ten of 
them side by side exactly fill a box that goes over 
the hive proper. The queen stays below in the 
brood-nest, but the worker bees come to the top to 
store the honey. Then, every two or three days, 
when the honey-flow is at its fullest, we open the 
super, take out the sealed combs, and put in combs 
that have been emptied by the extractor. In a few 
days these also are filled and capped by the bees, 
and are replaced by more empty combs in the same 
way; and so it goes on to the end of the honey- 
harvest.” 
We stood for a minute or two watching the work at 
the table. It went on at an extraordinary pace. Each 
workman seized one of the frames and poised it verti- 
cally over a shallow metal tray. Then, from a vessel 
of steaming hot water that stood at his elbow, he 
drew the long, flat-headed Bingham knife, and with 
one swift slithering cut removed the whole of the 
cell-cappings from the surface of the comb. At 
