30 THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE 



many points, assailable. But it must be remem- 

 bered that any observation of the inner life of the 

 honey-bee was then an extremely difficult thing. 

 It was next to impossible to see anything that was 

 going on inside the hives in use at that day^ 

 Pliny mentions a hive made of what he calls 

 mirror-stone, which was probably talc, and 

 through the transparent sides of which the work- 

 ing of the bees could be seen. But nothing of the 

 kind seems to have been attempted among English 

 bee-masters until the seventeenth century. More- 

 over, even if the whole hive had been made of 

 clear glass, the observer would have been very 

 little the wiser. He would have had the outer 

 sides of the two end combs in view, and he would 

 have seen much coming and going among the 

 bees, with an occasional glimpse of the queen. 

 But all the wonderful activity of the hive, so 

 laboriously ascertained by latter-day observers, 

 with the help of so many ingenious appliances, 

 goes on entirely in the hidden recesses of the 

 combs ; and any attempt to study this life under 

 the conditions appertaining in the Middle Ages 

 would have been manifestly futile. It was not 

 until Huber's leaf-hive was invented — when it 

 became to some extent possible to divide the 

 combs for a short time without hopelessly disturb- 

 ing the bees — that any real progress in bee-know- 

 ledge was made. The modern observation-hive, 

 wherein the bees are compelled to build their 



