unhive

Verb

unhive (third-person singular simple present unhives, present participle unhiving, simple past and past participle unhived)

1. (transitive) To drive or remove (bees) from a hive.
   • [T]he Mercers encreaſing prodigiouſly vvent back into the City; there like Bees unhiv'd they hover about a vvhile, not knovving vvhere to fix; but at laſt, as if they vvould come back to the old Hive in Pater-noſter Rovv, but could not be admitted, the ſvvarm ſettled on Lu[d]gate-hill.1727, [Daniel Defoe], “Of such Tradesmen who by the Necessary Consequences of Their Business are Oblig’d to be Accessary to the Propagation of Vice, and the Encrease of the Wickedness of the Times...
   • and unhived those numerous swarms of labouring bees which used to drop honey-dews over all this kingdom, to place in their room swarms of senseless drones.1867, James Bass Mullinger, Cambridge Characteristics in the Seventeenth Century, page 179
2. (archaic, transitive) To expel (a crowd, etc.) of habitation or shelter; to disband.
   • But if there be any who are herin delinquent; it were more justice and generosity to give a Catalogue of such Drones to those who have an undoubted Power to make them Labour, or Unhive them: And that the Righteous be not as the Wicked.1677, Lancelot Addison, A Modest Plea for the Clergy, page 98
   • We need no more, one age will discover the effects; the people insensibly file northwards, where they intrench themselves in the mud; the ocean is debarred her wantering, the hollow land made frim, the lakes drained; the loose sand becomes a stable foundation for great emporiums; the ancient cities...1814, Walter Scott, A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts, page 400
3. To break apart; to disrupt.
   • It would have been a continual hell of time-consuming impugnable argument, bringing on the kind of conjugal weather that closesup the rose and unhives the family for lack of any honey whatsoever.2015, Jonathan Bayliss, Prologos
   • You can't unsocialize your self, and you can't unhive yourself. We are merely a goal-less hive, a hive without purpose other than sustenance.2016, Eric Lunde, The Book of Accidents, page 102