Britain at Work
A Pictorial Description of Our National Industries

BRITAIN AT WORK. 202 To concentrate attention on a single stock is the best way to give practical value to the theoretical knowledge which, of course, the generality of beginners will have to gain in the first place from the careful study of some good treatise on the subject. When the aspiring bee-keeper has gained confidence in his handling of one hive, and has learned to understand the meaning- of all that goes on in it, it will be quite time to add one or two more by swarming or by purchase. Before getting any bees at all, however, it will be necessary to select a hive for their TAKING A SWARM OF BEES. reception. The developments of the past few years in these appliances are very in- teresting. Neither inside nor out are beehives at all what they used to be, and the depositing of honey has been manipulated and regulated until it has become quite a highly organised manufacture. The busy little dupes within the hive who, no doubt, still work under the delusion that they are prudently laying up store for the winter, are in fact all the time being inveigled into the filling of “ frames ” and little wooden “ sections ” holding just a pound of honey, all ready for handing across the counter. And this is not the only way in which the indefatigable little workers are befooled in the hives of the modern bee-farm. The old system was to set up a straw “ skep,” and just let them creep in and go to work their own way, plastering wax over the straw walls, and building honeycomb all round the inside of their circular home. This laborious bedaub- ing of the rough interior and the building up of cells, of course, took a good deal of time, and in the bee world time is honey. More- over, when the comb was built and filled it was difficult to get it out in any satisfactory form. But, besides all this, thoughtful ob- servers soon saw that it was a very wasteful system from the bee-keeper’s point of view. 1 he wax for comb building is not gathered, like honey, from flowers, but is produced in the body of the bee and is exuded through the scales of the abdomen. It was computed that to produce a single pound of wax the little artisan consumes from ten to twenty pounds of honey. It was evident that if the wax-building department of the ancient business could be reduced it would mean a corresponding addition to the other department, the storage of honey, and ingenuity was directed to effect this. The practical outcome of successive inventions has been to do away with the straw “ skep,” and to. substitute a convenient wooden hive, and the earlier stages of the wax cell building are clone by a machine shown in one of our illustrations. Thin sheets of wax are produced by clipping a board into the material in a molten condition and stripping the wax off when it is cold and hard. The sheets are then passed be- tween rollers, which indent them on both sides with little hexagonal hollows just the size and shape of the cell foundations. These honey- combed sheets are fixed in frames and sus- pended side by side across the interior of the square wooden hive, filling the whole space, except that passages are left between ths sheets just sufficient to permit of the bees crawling up over them. The industrious little simpletons creep into the hive and up among the suspended sheets, and, finding thousands upon thousands of cells apparently already commenced, set to work to finish them in the ordinary way. They are thus saved the trouble of producing a great amount of wax, and are able to get through the work of cell building and to begin depositing honey in only a small part of the time they would have taken over the business in the old skep. When the frames are filled, there is nothin? to do but to uncover the top and just lift them out if they are required, or a supplementary