Sir – The article (October 21) by Chris Koenig on John Wilkins, warden of Wadham College, draws welcome attention to the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, something of which Oxford should, of course, be justly proud, though it is noticeable that this is an anniversary that is largely passing the city by.

Happily, the Museum of the History of Science is marking this historic event by holding a day of talks focusing on Sir Robert Plot’s Natural History of Oxfordshire (1677) on November 13.

Readers unfamiliar with this great book may like to know that Plot commented at some length upon the ‘new sort of Boxes, or Colony Hives for Bees’ which he supposed had been invented by Wilkins, nothwithstanding he writes, rather disapprovingly, of ‘the Pretensions of John Gedde, gent and his seven years experience’.

This was a reference to John Gedde of Falkland, in Fife, whose ‘beehive of a peculiar contrivance sent out of Scotland’ was marketed in England with the purported support of the Royal Society to which it had been presented in 1672. Gedde published his book on Bee Houses and Colonies in 1675.

Plot records that there was one of Wilkins’s inventions set up in Wadham College garden while the latter was Warden.

Was this in fact the transparent beehive which Koenig tells us John Evelyn gave the Warden, or was Wadham College just generally humming in the mid-seventeenth century?

Dr Rowena E Archer, Fellow of Brasenose College