Christopher Wren, a Three-Story Beehive and the Bees That Ignored It

On 26 February 1654, by the date printed at its foot (probably February 1655 in modern reckoning), a Fellow of All Souls College in Oxford sat down to answer a request he had been putting off. Samuel Hartlib, the London collector and distributor of useful knowledge, wanted a full account of an experimental beehive that had been built in Oxford. The writer was Christopher Wren, then in his early twenties and still years away from architecture. He admitted he had been slow to reply, “because the Devise not fully answering our own expectation, I thought it would be much more unsatisfactory to you.”¹

Hartlib printed the letter anyway, together with a figure of the hive and a key to its parts, in The Reformed Common-wealth of Bees (1655).¹ It is a small document, but it opens a window (in this case a literal one) onto how a circle of English clergymen, scholars and gardeners tried to reform beekeeping in the 1650s, and onto a young man who would later design St Paul’s Cathedral reporting, with some candor, that the bees had not cooperated.

Why anyone wanted a new hive

In the mid-seventeenth century most English bees lived in skeps, upturned baskets of straw or wicker. The combs were fixed to the basket, and the usual way to take the honey and wax was to kill the colony first, often with sulfur smoke.² Hartlib’s book is full of correspondents who disliked that waste and wanted a hive from which honey could be taken while the bees lived on.

They worked from a mix of observation and inherited lore. The same volume that prints Wren’s letter also prints, without obvious skepticism, a Cornish recipe for generating bees from the rotting carcass of a young steer, alongside the more practical note that the Cornish gentleman kept his bees in hogsheads and took honey from the top of the cask while the bees worked “downwards” in the lower part.¹ Hartlib himself was less an author than an editor and relay station: he gathered letters from his network and passed them into print, and a recent study counts him among the great epistolary “intelligencers” of the period.²

The clergyman’s glass hive

The key figure behind the Oxford hive was not Wren but William Mewe, a Gloucestershire minister at a parish the book spells Easlington. In a letter of 19 September 1653, printed by Hartlib, Mewe explained where the idea came from. Charles Butler, an influential English writer on bees, had told of “a Gentleman, in Plinies time, that endeavoured to make their works transparent,” and thought it improbable; Mewe “tryed, and finished that Essay, to the satisfaction of my self and others.”¹ The ancient source is Pliny the Elder, who reports that the hatching of young bees was observed at the suburban retreat of a man of consular rank near Rome, “whose hives were made of transparent lantern horn.”³

Mewe’s hives had glass panes, and he was delighted with them. His bees, he wrote, “are much taken with their Grandeiur, and double their tasks with delight,” and he claimed fourteen quarts of honey from one transparent hive.¹ In a second letter he described the windows as giving him an account of the daily income “and a diary of their Negotiations,” so that half an hour after dinner told him what the colony had done that day, and let him show friends the “Queens Cells” and sometimes the queen herself.¹ (Other letters in the same book call the colony’s ruler a king; the biology was not settled.)

Mewe also mentioned that he had given a model or description to John Wilkins, Warden of Wadham College, who had set one up in his garden and was building another “with augmentations.”¹ Hartlib, replying in November 1653, called Mewe “the Father of the Invention” and asked for a full description of the transparent hive.¹ A recent study puts Mewe’s first modular hives probably in the late 1640s.²

The apiaries at Wadham

Wilkins’s version became one of the sights of Oxford. On 13 July 1654 the diarist John Evelyn dined with him at Wadham and recorded that Wilkins “was the first who showed me the transparent apiaries, which he had built like castles and palaces, and so ordered them one upon another, as to take the honey without destroying the bees.”⁴ They were decorated with dials, little statues and vanes, and Wilkins gave Evelyn an empty hive for his garden at Sayes Court, where, Evelyn says, it stood for many years and the King later came to see it.⁴

Wren was part of the same company. Two days earlier Evelyn had visited “that miracle of a youth, Mr. Christopher Wren” at All Souls, and in the Wadham entry he lists curiosities in Wilkins’s lodgings made by Wilkins and by “that prodigious young scholar Mr. Christopher Wren.”⁴ The hive Wren describes to Hartlib is “our three-storied-Bee-hive,” a shared Oxford project rather than a solo invention. The letter does not say where it stood, but it belongs to the same circle of experimenters around Wilkins.¹⁴

Three octagonal boxes

The key printed under the figure describes the design closely. The hive was made of three “Octogonall Boxes,” identical in shape and size.¹ Each had a hole in the top with a cover that turned on a pin and could be pulled shut by a wire; the ends of the wires came out through small holes so the covers could be worked from outside. Each box had its own small door for the bees, opened or shut by sliders. The upper edges of each box were sloped convexly and the bottoms concavely, so “that any one Box may fit to any of the other two.”¹

At the back of each box was a hinged, lockable door about four inches by six, and inside it “a peece of cleere glasse” cemented to the box, “to look in vpon occasion.” The boxes were lined with rush matting, and the whole stood in a stone case that served as both stand and cover.¹

The interchangeable boxes are the important feature. Because any box could sit on any other, a full box could in principle be lifted away with its honey while the colony carried on in the rest. Philip Steadman, writing about the episode, has suggested that the figure may be Wren’s first architectural drawing.⁵ Hartlib’s book does not say who drew it, so that remains a suggestion.

What the bees did

Wren’s account of the trial is brief and honest. The previous May (most likely May 1654, if the letter’s date follows the old English year that began in March) the Oxford experimenters put two swarms into the hive together, with the entrance open only in the lowest box but the passages between all three boxes open.¹ The bees began comb in the middle box, then in the bottom box, and filled both with honey. They started two small combs in the top box, which they had otherwise left empty, and extended a comb from the middle box up into the passage, nearly blocking it. Wren wondered whether that blockage explained why the top box was neglected.¹

The plan had been the reverse. The experimenters expected the bees to work most in the top and middle boxes, so that once the colony had enough for itself the top box could be removed and the cycle repeated. If the bees again ignored the top, Wren wrote, the bottom box could be taken instead, “but if that be so, then two Hives will be sufficient.” He closed by asking Hartlib for other people’s observations, “for as yet you see ours is imperfect, and we know not what to make of it.”¹

Hartlib’s book prints a reply directly after the figure, “Considerations upon the Letter from Oxford,” by an unnamed correspondent who had discussed it with a Mr. Greatrix. Its diagnosis was that bees “naturally begin in the top of the Hive and work downwards,” and dislike a hive more than one or two stories high.¹ The writer’s remedy was to start with one box, set a new empty box underneath when it filled, and remove the top box only once the colony had moved down, so that bees returning heavy with nectar would not have to climb three stories “according to the Oxford practise.”¹ In modern terms, the correspondent favored adding new boxes beneath the colony rather than above it, a reading that fits the way Wren’s swarms had neglected the top box.

After Oxford: boxes, a bee-master and the Royal Society

The octagonal stacking box outlived the Oxford trial. In 1679 Moses Rusden, an apothecary who styled himself bee-master to the King, published A Further Discovery of Bees, its title page claiming publication by royal command and approval by the Royal Society at Gresham College.⁶⁷ In the second edition of 1685 Rusden dedicated the book to the Society and credited “the transparant Hives first shewed to us by Dr. Wilkins, late Bishop of Chester,” later improved “by one Geddie, and since by my self.”⁷

Rusden’s boxes are recognizably descendants of the Oxford hive. “The form is octagon or eight square,” he wrote, because a near-round shape kept the bees, clustered in the center, closer to the honey in the corners. The boxes, best made of fir, had two glass windows with covers and a sliding shutter over a hole in the top.⁷ His method also matched what the Oxford “Considerations” had recommended, though Rusden does not cite it: a new box was put under the colony, the top box was later shut off and removed, and a third box went underneath when needed, giving what he called a circulation of three boxes and the taking of honey “without the Bees destruction.”⁷ He offered correctly made boxes for sale at his own house.⁷

The “Geddie” Rusden named was John Gedde of Falkland in Fife. In 1672 Sir Robert Moray presented to the Royal Society’s Repository “a bee-hive of a peculiar contrivance, sent out of Scotland,” and the historian D. J. Bryden has studied how Gedde’s design was then marketed in England with the purported support of the Society.⁸ Recent work notes that much of Rusden’s book promotes Gedde as maker and supplier of such hives, a design that drew on Mewe’s earlier one.² The question of who deserved credit, in other words, was entangled with commerce from the start.

Rusden’s natural history was less advanced than his carpentry. He insisted “That the King-Bee is a Male, and the only Male in every Colony and Hive of Bees,” a step back from Charles Butler, whose 1623 Feminine Monarchie had argued that the colony’s leader was female.⁷² Windows let these writers watch bees, but did not by themselves settle what they were seeing.

Wren’s part, in proportion

Wren’s place in this story is real but modest. He did not invent the transparent hive, which Mewe and his contemporaries traced back through Butler to Pliny, and the Oxford hive belonged to Wilkins’s circle as much as to him.¹³ What survives in his name is a precise description of interchangeable octagonal boxes, a careful report of a trial that failed in an instructive way, and a request for more data. The answer that came back, that bees build downward and new boxes belong underneath, is the same method that Rusden was selling a generation later, though no source shows that one led directly to the other.¹⁷

There is something characteristic of the early Royal Society circle in the episode: a question about honey turned into an experiment, an experiment into a printed letter, and an unexpected result into a public request for other people’s observations.

Footnotes

1. Hartlib 1655: Carew’s experiment, pp. 2-3; Mewe to Angelo, pp. 41-43; Hartlib to Mewe, pp. 43-46; Mewe’s answer, pp. 46-49; Wren’s letter, pp. 50-51; figure key, unnumbered p. [52]; “Considerations upon the Letter from Oxford,” pp. 53-54. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷ ↩¹⁸ ↩¹⁹

2. Hogg 2025, Bee-ing Human project, introduction and sections 1 and 3. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

3. Pliny, Natural History 11.16, trans. Bostock and Riley. ↩ ↩²

4. Evelyn, Diary, ed. Bray, entries for 11 and 13 July 1654. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Steadman, “Christopher Wren and friends watch the bees.” ↩

6. Wellcome Collection catalogue record for Rusden 1679 (Wing R2313). ↩

7. Rusden 1685, title page; dedication “To the Royal Society”; Section 3 on the King-Bee; Section 4, chs. 3-4. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

8. Bryden 1994, abstract. ↩