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 poised it vertically over a shallow metal tray. Then, from a vessel 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 blades went to work on another frame. As each trolley was fully loaded it was whisked off to the extracting-machine and another took its place.
“All this work,” explained the bee-master, as we passed on, “is done after dark, because in the daytime the bees would smell the honey and would besiege us. So we cannot begin extracting until they are all safely hived for the night.” He stopped before a row of bulky cylinders. “These,” he said, “are the honey ripeners. Each of them holds about twenty gallons, and all the honey is kept here for three or four days to mature before it is ready for market. If we were to send it out at once it would ferment and spoil. In the top of each drum there are fine wire strainers, and the honey must run through these, and finally through thick flannel, before it gets into the cylinder. Then, when it is ripe, it is drawn off and bottled.”