BEE-MASTERS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 31 



combs between glass partitions, one over the 

 other instead of side by side, was a still greater 

 advance, and rendered the whole interior of the 

 bee-dwelling available for study. But it is open 

 to objection that bee-life in such a contrivance is 

 carried on under too artificial conditions. In a 

 natural bee-nest, the combs are built roughly side 

 by side, and the brood is reared in the centre area 

 of each comb, the surface covered by the breeding- 

 cells diminishing outwards in each direction. Thus 

 the brood-nest takes a globular form, with the 

 honey-stores above and around it ; and this natural 

 arrangement is inevitably destroyed in a hive 

 where the combs are superimposed and not 

 collateral. 



In the face, therefore, of the practical impossi- 

 bility of learning anything about bees when they 

 were housed in the usual straw-skep, the old bee- 

 masters confined themselves to a repetition of the 

 beliefs of the ancient writers, deftly interwoven 

 with speculations of their own, which, as no one 

 was in a position to refute them, were advanced 

 with all the more daring and assurance. 



They seem to have been, in the main, agreed 

 on the point that the ordinary generative prin- 

 ciple, otherwise universal throughout creation, was 

 miraculously dispensed with in the single case of 

 the honey-bee. Moses Rusden, who was bee- 

 master to King Charles the Second, and who 

 published his " Further Discovery of Bees " so 



