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> Skep beehives & garden plot near tintern abbey 1875
Skep beehives & garden plot near tintern abbey 1875
This is a vintage woodcut engraving titled "Tintern Abbey." showing the "bare ruined choirs" and arches of this lovely pile of old stones. A man in the foreground is working a garden plot. There are several beehives, old style basket skeps, nearby. It is in excellent condition and was published in Picturesque Europe in 1875.
Traditional beehives simply provided an enclosure for the bee colony. Because no internal structures were provided for the bees, the bees created their own honeycomb within the hives. The comb is often cross-attached and cannot be moved without destroying it. This is sometimes called a 'fixed-frame' hive to differentiate it from the modern 'movable-frame' hives. Harvest generally destroyed the hives, though there were some adaptations using extra top baskets which could then be removed when the bees filled them with honey. These were gradually supplanted with box hives of varying dimensions, with or without frames, and finally replaced by newer modern equipment.
In northern and western Europe, baskets made of coils of grass or straw, called skeps, were used as beehives. In its simplest form, there is a single entrance at the bottom of the skep. Again, there is no internal structure provided for the bees, and the colony must produce its own honeycomb. Skeps have two disadvantages: beekeepers can not inspect the interior for diseases and pests, and honey removal often results in the destruction of the entire hive. Beekeepers either drove the bees out of the skep, or killed them. Skeps were then squeezed in a vise to extract the honey.
Later designs included a smaller woven basket on top with a small hole to the main skep. This acted as a crude super, allowing the harvesting of some honey with less destruction of brood and bees. In Scots, such an extension-piece placed below a straw bee-hive to give extra room for breeding, was called a nadder.
The paper is mildly age toned. The overall size is approx. 9.50 by 13 inches. There is text on the reverse side. This is not a reproduction or reprint. It is a vintage engraving, over 130 years old, and guaranteed to be as described.
Woodcut engravings were used in books, magazines, and illustrated newspapers in the middle of the 19th century before the widespread use of photographic images. To create a woodcut engraving, an artist would first draw his illustration on paper either from direct observation or from dagueorrotypes, or early photographs. Skilled workers would transfer the drawing to the surface of a very hard block of wood. Then the engravers went to work, carving into the wood to produce an original engraved block, from which plates were made for printing the images. This technique was used to create the pictures we find in inumerable books and magazines, Harper's Weekly and other illustrated publications including Ballou's Pictorial, Frank Leslie's publications, and Gleason's Pictorial.
