"236 



The Modern Bee-Hi ye. 



[June, 



was at once grasped by all bee-keepers, and as soon as it was 

 discovered that these frames could be fitted with thin sheets 

 of beeswax — impressed all over on both sides with a hexagonal 

 pattern to represent cell -bases, which the bees would readily 

 draw out into comb — then the craft came into possession of a. 

 thing which worked a complete revolution in the honey and 

 wax industry. For the first time it then became possible to 

 " manage " a hive — to add new frames to the brood-nest when 

 the queen required more room for egg-laying; to do away with 

 old clogged and useless combs and substitute good ones; to 

 take combs of brood from over-populous colonies and give them 

 to less forw^ard ones; to control the breeding of drones by 

 limiting the area of drone-comb in the hive, and by closer inter- 

 -spacing of the combs; to get at any part of the bee-city at a 

 moment's notice for renewal of queens, or any other of a 

 variety of operations; to prevent sw^arming by cutting out 

 queen-cells, giving more room in the brood-nest by emptying 

 existing combs of their honey, and adding comb-space for the 

 queen; to make artificial swarms w^hen required; and, above 

 all, to keep up an inexhaustible supply of honey-combs, these 

 being taken away as soon as filled, the honey in them removed 

 by the centrifugal extracting machine, and the empty combs 

 returned at once to the hive to be filled again. This latter 

 possibility alone, by saving the bees the labour and time needed 

 for comb-building just when both labour and time were most 

 precious — during the height of the honey-flow^ — stamped the 

 movable-comb hive as a veritable triumph of utility, and at 

 once made it possible to obtain tw^ce as much honey as hereto- 

 fore from any given stock. 



In so far as a full exploitation of the advantages of the 

 movable-comb system is concerned, bee-keepers have indeed 

 little with which to reproach themselves. In the matter of 

 hives, howwer, w^e are in a very different case. It is here 

 that bee-keeping science has kept its pristine babyhood almost 

 intact. The straw^-skep age was succeeded by an age of plain 

 wooden box-hives; and the hive of the present day, for all 

 its ingeniously contrived interior, remains a box and nothing 

 more. Yet it should be a great deal more. It is vital, in fact, 

 to the whole future prosperity of the craft that bee-keepers 

 should generally recognise prevailing deficiencies in hive-con- 

 struction and set about remedying them without delay. 



The main fault of almost all hives obtainable commercially 

 at the present time, is that their walls are too thin. This may, 

 at first glance, seem an immaterial point, provided that the 



