Each section contains about 1 lb. of honey, and you may often see them for sale, at about one shilling each. Some people prefer honey when it has been extracted from the sections and put into glass jars; myself, I think it is far nicer to eat it from the comb. An average hive will give about 30 or 40 lbs. of honey a season, but you can easily imagine that a great deal depends upon the weather. The situation of the hive counts, too, for hives in the south of England give more honey than do those farther north. This is because the flowers in that part are much finer and yield more nectar, and also because the climate is warmer. [Illustration: PLATE XXXI Bees on White Clover] CHAPTER XXXVII MODERN BEE-KEEPING We have already seen that straw hives were formerly used to keep bees in. They had many disadvantages, and perhaps the greatest was that sections could not be put on to collect the extra honey. The only way in which it could be obtained was to kill the bees and to take the honey they had stored for themselves. The bees were generally suffocated by the fumes of burning sulphur, and so you will see that besides being inconvenient this method of bee-keeping was also very cruel. The hives with the greatest number of bees were the healthiest, and they were selected for treatment in this manner, for they had more honey stored away than the weaker ones. In this way all the best bees were killed off, and those that we have at the present time are descended from poor ancestors. It will be many years before they have been brought back to their former state of excellence. After the bees had been suffocated, the old bee-keepers took out the combs. These were not built in frames as are those of the present day, but were just made inside the skep in any way the bees liked. The honey was then extracted from them, but it was of very poor quality, for pieces of broken comb, pollen, and even dead grubs, or parts of the bees themselves, were mixed up with it. How different this is from the beautifully clear honey obtained by the modern methods. [Illustration: PLATE XXXII From a photograph by] [E. Hawks Sealing over the Honey Cells] After the cells have been filled with honey the bees leave them uncovered for a little time, so that the water in the honey may evaporate. The honey then ripens, and the chemist bees place a tiny drop of formic acid in each cell. When all is ready, the cells are sealed over, and in Plate XXXII. we may see the bees at work doing this. You will be interested to know that the English bees do not quite fill the cells, and so the colour of the honey does not show. Foreign bees, however, fill the cells quite to the brim, which gives the comb a dark and dirty appearance.