People's Pilot, Volume 6, Number 32, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 28 January 1897 — A Prehistoric Beehive. [ARTICLE]

A Prehistoric Beehive.

A curious and interesting discovery was recently made in a stone quarry near Atchison, Kan. The quarry is on the western or Kansas bluff of the Missouri river. The area of the company’s operation had to be extended, by reason of increase of orders for rip-rap stone, and 100 feet of ground in length by 25 in width was denuded of the primeval forest,, and the earth above eighteen feet in depth, scraped off. After the rock had been reached a hole of about fifteen feet in

depth was drilled into it by a steam drill. Then explosives were emptied into the hole* and tamped down and a fuse at* tached. After all this there was a great upheaval of rock. When the workmen went to ascertain the result of the blast they discovered a great cavity in the original rock, that, as they think, had been many years ago a great beehive. There were rib bees, but they account for that by the dust on the floor of the cavity. That there was honey there and palatable honey is vouchedfor by all the workmen. The cavity in the rock was a perfect beehive, and in its congeries of hexagonal cells differed in no particular from the architexture of the busy bees of prehistoric as well as present times. . Whether this honey is the product of bees of this age, which had found some opening through the moutain of earth above to the rock’s cavity, or whether it it is honey that has been sealed in the everlasting rock* since the consensus of opinion gives to it the title of “prehistoric honey.”—Farmers Voice.