Alfred Neighbour in his book The Apiary published 1866 devotes ten pages to
description and management of this hive.  Quoting him it takes its name
from Stewarton, Ayrshire, Scotland.  He considered it an excellent hive but
today it would be classed as weird, wacky and wonderful, an attractive
example of the woodworker's craft but hardly practical.
Firstly it is octagonal, not hexagonal as someone thought so it needs the 
skill of a cabinet maker to construct it.  The brood chamber consists of
three boxes five and a half inches deep sitting on each other and
positioned by buttons aided, no doubt, by propolis later.  These each have
nine fixed top bars, the centre ones full width of fourteen inches and the
outer ones smaller because of the octagonal shape.  On top of this goes the
super or supers, no excluder.  The super is four inches deep and has seven
fiixed top bars.  The reasoning is that the wide spacing will give very
deep cells for honey storage and the queen will not lay in them. "" We have
too much confidence in her Majesty's sagacity to expect her to make such an
attempt in honey cells thus elongated: doubtless she will only look  and
pass on, seeking more suitable depositories, and confine her nursery to
those lower regions where she is welcome""   
 Each box has two little windows, back and front, with sliding shutters,
for inspection purposes.  More skilled cabinet work.  Strangely, Neighbour
remarked, the hive came from the makers without floor or roof.  He surmised
it was best kept under cover in a beehouse.  It was quite common in those 
days for the well-to-do who dabbled in beekeeping to keep their bees under
an ornamental pagoda type roof.
When the super or supers are full they have to be removed by smoking the
bees down and slipping a string or wire under one edge and drawing it
across to separate any combs attached to the top bars below.  A messy
business.        
Once the bees had occupied the three broodchambers and glued combs to walls
and top bars the hive became in effect a glorified skep and impossible to 
strip down without destroying the colony.  There was no question of routine
inspections as of today.  A swarm was bound to issue and was wekcomed.
Although this book was published some fifteen years after L L Langstroth
revealed to the world his moveable frame hive its use was slow to catch on
in this country and for many years fixed top bar hives continued to be
marketed.  Commercial beekeepers were quick to realise the value of
Langstroth's discovery but the little man in the villages continued with
his skeps and fixed bar hives well into the present century.  Wages were
low and straw cost nothing.  The man who introduced me to beekeeping in
1930 still kept bees in skeps and I can still remember watching him drive 
bees from a full skep to an empty one by the art of drumming.    Sid P.     
        Sid  P.