The sweet summer dusk was over the bee-farm.  On every side, as I passed through, the starlight showed me the crowding roofs of the city of hives; and beyond these I could just make out the dim outline of the extracting-house, with a cheerful glow of lamplight streaming out from window and door.  The of and the voices of the bee-master and his men grew louder as I approached.  A great business seemed to be going forward within.  In the centre of the building stood a strange-looking engine, like a brewer’s on legs.  It was eight or nine feet broad and some five feet high; and a big horizontal wheel lay within the great circle, completely filling its whole .  As I entered, the wheel was going round with a deep noise as fast as two strong men could work the gearing; and the bee-master stood close by, carefully the operation.  
“Halt!” he shouted.  The great wheel-of-fortune stopped.  A long iron bar was pulled down and the wheel rose out of the vat.  Now I could see that its whole outer was covered with frames of honeycomb, each in its separate gauze-wire cage.  The bee-master a lever.  The cages—there must have been twenty-five or thirty of them—turned over like single leaves of a book, bringing the other side of each comb into place.  The wheel dropped down once more, and swung round again on its giddy journey.  From my place by the door I could hear the honey driving out against the sides of the vat like heavy rain.
 
“Halt!” cried the bee-master again.  Once more the big wheel rose, and dripping, into the yellow lamplight.  And now a was pushed up with more honeycomb ready for extraction.  The wire-net cages were opened, the empty combs taken out, and full ones put in their place.  The wheel down again into its , and began its deep song once more.  The bee-master gave up his post to the foreman, and came towards me, wiping the honey from his hands.  He was very proud of his big extractor, and quite willing to explain the whole process.  “In the old days,” he said, “the only way to get the honey from the comb was to press it out.  You could not obtain your honey without destroying the comb, which at this season of the year is worth very much more than the honey itself; for if the combs can be emptied and restored perfect to the hive, the bees will fill them again immediately, without having to waste valuable time in the height of the honey-flow by stopping to make new combs.  And when the bees are wax-making they are not only prevented from honey, but have to consume their own stores.  While they are making one pound of comb they will eat seventeen or eighteen pounds of honey.  So the man who hit upon the idea of drawing the honey from the comb by centrifugal force did a splendid thing for modern bee-farming.  English honey was nothing until the extractor came and changed bee-keeping from a hobby into an important industry.  But come and see how the thing is done from the beginning.”
 
He led the way towards one end of the building.  Here three or four men were at work at a long table surrounded by great stacks of honeycombs in their oblong wooden frames.  The bee-master took up one of these.  “This,” he explained, “is the bar-frame just as it comes from the hive.  Ten of them side by side exactly fill a box that goes over the hive proper.  The queen stays below in the brood-nest, but the worker bees come to the top to store the honey.  Then, every two or three days, when the honey-flow is at its fullest, we open the super, take out the sealed combs, and put in combs that have been emptied by the extractor.  In a few days these also are filled and capped by the bees, and are replaced by more empty combs in the same way; and so it goes on to the end of the honey-harvest.”
 
We stood for a minute or two watching the work at the table.  It went on at an extraordinary pace.  Each workman seized one of the frames and it over a shallow metal tray.  Then, from a of steaming hot water that stood at his elbow, he drew the long, flat-headed Bingham knife, and with one swift slithering cut removed the whole of the cell-tappings from the surface of the comb.  At once the knife was thrown back into its smoking bath, and a second one taken out, with which the other side of the comb was treated.  Then the comb was hung in the rack of the trolley, and the keen hot blade............