EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN HIVE 215 
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 re- 
spects 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 abom- 
inate 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 fion. 
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 
