Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: w INTRODUCTION. Bees in every age have excited the attention of the curious; their natural history has always been a subject of interesting investigation to the philosophic naturalist, and the management of the apiary a source of happiness and .emolument to the rural cottager. The information gained, however, in this department of natural history, has by no means
been proportionate to the multitude of in-
vestigators, and to the time and labour spent in the contemplation. Little additional knowledge was acquired for ages, and not until a comparatively late period was any thing done that could throw much light upon the subject. This was not altogether owing to the want of a spirit of inquiry; but to the impossibility of observing what passed between the combs, even in glass skapes, as they were formerly constructed. In order to obviate this radical defect in the means of observation, Reaumur, the celebrated Trench naturalist, used glass skapes so thin as to contain only two combs. These, however, it is evident, could not wholly remove the difficulty of observation, and the famous Swiss apiarian, Huber, found it absolutely necessary to make the frames which he used in his experiments so thin as to leave room for only one comb. Several of these frames placed parallel to each other, and closely connected, constitute what the inventor himself styles the leaf or book-skape, from its opening and shutting somewhat in the manner of the leaves of a book, so that when the different divisions are successively opened, both surfaces of every comb are at pleasure brought fully into view. As will readily be imagined, the invention of the leaf-skape enabled M. Huber to prosecute his experiments with a facility and success unknown to former naturalists. His discoveries are numer…
