22 BEE-KEEPING FOR PROFIT 
manipulate. That settled, he can then adopt 
for general use the one best suited to his 
purpose. 
The Skep Hive.—The skep hive, made of 
straw, is the survival of those pre-scientific 
days when bee-keeping was conducted without 
method, other than providing a house for 
the bees. Except that it is still used by some 
who will not take the trouble to adapt them- 
selves to the modern methods, the skep hive 
would find no mention in a book on bee- 
keeping for profit. Primarily the skep was 
made by our forefathers merely as a means of 
securing the bees for the honey season, by 
providing them with a ready-made home in 
which they could prepare their combs and 
store their honey. Originally it was a rough 
structure of straw, bound together probably 
with bramble-runners, peeled and split, and it 
has developed into the form in which we 
know it to-day. Its picturesqueness in the 
cottage flower garden cannot be denied, neither 
can its utility up to a certain point, and that 
point was when the time of the ingathering 
of the honey harvest arrived, for to secure the 
honey the bees were destroyed. As a rule, it is 
the hive that contains the best queen which 
has the most honey, and as the skep that was 
