What does the expression 'hiving out' mean?

Don't know about hiving out but to hive off means to remove from a larger unit or group; form into or assign (work) to a subsidiary department or company; denationalize or privatize (an industry, etc.) (OED)

In colonial New England, it meant leaving a town when the rules or the neighbours were not to one's liking and settling somewhere else.
http://www.usahistory.com/trivia/historical/hg.htm

A quote from James Howard Kunstler's book, "The Geography of Nowhere":

Typically, an early Massachusetts town was organized with individually owned home lots around a fenced common used to pen livestock. Townships were granted whole congregations who crossed the ocean as a group, bringing with them highly localized customs and farming practices. There if a minority couldn't abide the way a town was run, they could resolve their problem by "hiving out" to some unsettled area, always in a group, and creating a way of life with which they were at ease.

Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere, page 20
Cited to Kostof, America by Design, page 297