This is, of course, as true of the modern bee-hive as it is of all other appliances of world-wide utility. But it is equally true that everything must have had a prime at some time, and through some special human agency or other; and, in the case of the bar-frame hive, the honours appear to be pretty equally divided between two personages widely separated in the world’s history—Samson and Sir Christopher .
Perhaps these two names have never before been bracketed together either in or out of print; yet that the association is not a fanciful, but in all respects a natural and necessary one will not be difficult to prove.
The story of how Samson, unconsciously, first gave the idea of the movable comb-frame to an English bee-master is probably new to most apiarians. As to whether the cloud of insects which Samson saw about the carcase of the dead lion were honey-bees or merely drone-flies, we need not here pause to determine. We are concerned for the moment only with one modern explanation of the incident. This is that, although honey-bees in general, in this particular case the carcase had been so dried and emptied and purified by the sun and usual scavenging agencies of the desert as to leave nothing but a shell—a very serviceable makeshift for a bee-hive, in fact—consisting of the tanned skin stretched over the of the lion.
In the summer of 1834 a certain Major Munn was walking among his hives, pondering the ancient Bible , when a sudden brilliant idea occurred to him. Like most advanced bee-keepers of his day, he had long grown dissatisfied with the straw hive, and his bees were housed in square wooden boxes. But these, although more , were nearly as unmanageable as the skeps. The bees built their combs within them on just the same plan; and, once built, the combs were to the tops of the boxes. Now, the idea which had occurred to Major Munn was simply this: He reflected that the combs built by the bees in the dry shell of the lion-skin were probably attached each to one of the encircling ribs; so that, when Samson took the honey-comb, all he need have done was to remove a , bringing the attached comb away with it. Thereupon Major Munn set to work to make a hive on the rib-plan, which was composed of a number of wooden frames side by side, each to contain a comb and each removable at will. Since that time numberless small and great improvements have been devised; but, in its essence, the modern hive is no more than the dried lion-skin by the ribs, as Samson found it on that day when he went on his fateful mission of wooing.
The part played by Sir Christopher Wren in the evolution of the bar-frame hive, though not so romantic, was with almost equal significance to modern bee-craft. Movable comb-frames were as yet undreamed of in Wren’s time, nearly two hundred years before Major Munn invented them. But Wren seems to have been the discoverer of a principle just as important. This was what latter-day bee-keepers call “storification.” Wren’s hive consisted of a series of wooden boxes, octagonal in shape, placed one below the other, with inter-communicating doors, and glass windows in the sides of each section. Up to that date bee-hives had been merely single receptacles made of straw, plastered wattles, or wood. When the stock had its there was nothing for it but to
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