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 
