This topic was discussed in July, but I thought I'd give it another whirl-

The yellow melon beads pictured here were advertised as 18th century Chinese.

Follow-on posts show a bead advertised as Czech in origin.

For comparison, the last set of images is a bead from my collection which seems to be similar to the "Czech" one. The bead was a gift from a BCN acquaintance from Taiwan, but I don't recall asking where he got the bead.

A conjecture of mine is that the Chinese made the original versions, which were then copied by Europeans, wither Czech or Venetian. Or, could it have been the other way around? Two versions of this basic bead appear on the early 20th century Conterie card image #32 (link to the images is on the Articles page). Both seem more "regular" in shape than the images I'm posting here.

Any ideas out there?