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 
