Regarding the intended use of the “beehive” niches, a number of theories has arisen. The first known thorough researcher of the subject area was Gyula Bartalos, a historian and archaeologist priest from Eger. His theory was that the beehive rocks had been shrines, with ashes of human remains put into the niches. He linked the carving of rock niches to “Hun” Hungarians first, and to Celts and Scythians later. Gáspár Klein, a chief archivist of Borsod county, suggested that the dummy windows could have served as idol niches, and dated them to the age of the so-called Hungarian conquest (9th–10th centuries). Bartalos had already mentioned the currently most accepted opinion (that the niches had been used for beekeeping), with expressing his doubts: “Ordinary people who tend to guess right away call these rocks «beehive rocks»; they think these could have been apiaries of ancient people, as if bees would live in rocks and on shadowy sides.” – published in the ], 1891. The dominant agent of the beekeeping opinion was , a medical doctor from the city of Miskolc. In the early 1960s, he even conducted some archaeological excavations in front of beehive rocks, with archaeologist József Korek, at sites near Cserépváralja and Szomolya. However, their archaeological finds, dated to the 11th–14th centuries, could not justify any of the theories.