48 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



their remarkable systems and policies. In all 

 likelihood the bee-masters, the practical men who 

 owned the hives, had much the same shrewd 

 faculty of leaving things alone in far-off times as 

 we observe among the skeppists of the last genera- 

 tion. In many ways, what they did at last come 

 to do they did ill, notably in the apparently 

 insane practice of destroying the bees to obtain 

 the honey. But even this was not so foolish a 

 procedure as it appears to-day. It was a plain 

 matter of business, according to the lights of the 

 time. Their process was to condemn to the sulphur- 

 pit all the lightest and the heaviest of their stocks. 

 Experience taught them that the weak colonies 

 stood little chance of getting through the winter 

 unless they were artificially fed ; while if the bees 

 of the large colonies were preserved, after being 

 robbed of their stores, they would need the same 

 provision. It was a matter of arithmetic. Artificial 

 feeding was then a much more costly affair than 

 it is to-day, and the reckoning came out well on 

 the side of slaughter. The worst part of the 

 business, so far as modern scientific bee-breeders 

 are concerned, is that the old system of destruc- 

 tion tended to preserve only those strains of 

 bees who were inveterate swarmers; while the 

 steady, industrious stay-at-homes, who accumu- 

 lated the largest stores of honey, were invari- 

 ably exterminated. This is a fateful legacy to 

 have passed on, when we consider that one of 



