216 THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW 
of his day, he had long grown dissatisfied with the 
straw hive, and his bees were housed in square 
wooden boxes. But these, although more lasting, 
were nearly as unmanageable as the skeps. The 
bees built their combs within them on just the same 
haphazard plan; and, once built, the combs were 
fixed permanently to the tops of the boxes. Now, 
the idea which had occurred to Major Munn was 
simply this: He reflected that the combs built by 
the bees in the dry shell of the lion-skin were 
probably attached each to one of the encircling 
ribs; so that, when Samson took the honey-comb, 
all he need have done was to remove a rib, bring- 
ing the attached comb away with it. Thereupon 
Major Munn set to work to make a hive on the rib- 
plan, which was composed of a number of wooden 
frames standing side by side, each to contain a 
comb and each removable at will. Since that time 
numberless small and great improvements have 
been devised; but, in its essence, the modern hive is 
no more than the dried lion-skin distended by the 
ribs, as Samson found it on that day when he went 
on his fateful mission of wooing. 
The part played by Sir Christopher Wren in the 
evolution of the bar-frame hive, though not so 
romantic, was fraught with almost equal significance 
to modern bee-craft. Movable comb-frames were 
as yet undreamed of in Wren’s time, nearly two 
hundred years before Major Munn invented them. 
But Wren seems to have been the discoverer of a 
principle just as important. This was what latter- 
day bee-keepers call ‘‘ storification.’’ Wren’s hive 
consisted of a series of wooden boxes, octagonal in 
shape, placed one below the other, with inter- 
