The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Lore of the Honey-Bee, by Tickner Edwardes This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: The Lore of the Honey-Bee Author: Tickner Edwardes Release Date: February 12, 2021 [eBook #64532] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII) ***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE*** This etext was transcribed by Les Bowler THE LORE OF THE HONEY-BEE BY TICKNER EDWARDES AUTHOR OF “THE BEE-MASTER OF WARRILOW” WITH TWENTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS THIRD EDITION METHUEN & CO. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON First Published August 1908 Second Edition October 1908 Third Edition 1909 TO THE CHAIRMAN OF THE BRITISH BEE-KEEPERS’ ASSOCIATION, p. iv p. v THOMAS WILLIAM COWAN, F.L.S., ETC., TO WHOSE LABOURS AND RESEARCHES THE WRITER, AND ALL OTHER BEE-KEEPERS, ARE UNDER A LASTING OBLIGATION. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Introduction: The Oldest Craft under the Sun ix I. The Ancients and the Honey-bee 1 II. The Isle of Honey 18 III. Bee-masters in the Middle Ages 28 IV. At the City Gates 50 V. The Commonwealth of the Hive 67 VI. Early work in the Bee-City 84 VII. The Genesis of the Queen 94 VIII. The Bride-widow 117 IX. The Sovereign Worker-bee 127 X. A Romance of Anatomy 146 XI. The Mystery of the Swarm 174 XII. The Comb-builders 195 XIII. “Where the Bee Sucks” 219 XIV. The Drone and his Story 233 XV. After the Feast 248 XVI. The Modern Bee-farm 257 XVII. Bee-keeping and the Simple Life 267 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS The Comb-builders Frontispiece FACING PAGE Moses Rusden’s Bee-book 28 Butler’s “Bees Madrigall” 34 John Thorley in his Study 40 Inverted Straw Hive 50 An old Sussex Bee-house 60 Comb-frame from Modern Hive 72 Winter in the Bee-garden 86 Drone-brood and Worker-brood 94 Queen-bee Laving 106 A Queen-cell 110 The Honey-bee, in Fact and Fancy 128 p. vii p. viii Brood-comb, Showing all Stages of Bee-life 140 The Bee-nursery 166 A Swarm in May 174 A Mammoth Swarm 178 Hiving the Swarm 182 The Swarm Hived 188 Honeycomb Construction 206 Comb built Upwards 216 In the Storehouse 230 Queen-bee in Off-season 248 Bad Beemanship 264 A Forest Apiary 272 INTRODUCTION THE OLDEST CRAFT UNDER THE SUN One of the oldest and prettiest fables in ancient mythology is that which deals with the origin of the honey-bee. It was to Melissa and her sister Amalthea, the beautiful daughters of the King of Crete, that the god Jupiter was entrusted by his mother Ops, when Saturn, his father—following his custom of devouring his children at birth—sought to make the usual meal of this, his latest offspring. The story is variously rendered by ancient writers. Some say that bees already existed in the world, and that Amalthea was only a goat, whose milk served to nourish the baby-god, in addition to the honey that Melissa obtained from the wild bees in the cave where Jupiter lay hidden. Another account has it that the bees themselves were drawn to his place of concealment by the noise made by his nurses, who beat continually on brazen pans to keep the sound of his infant lamentations from the ears of his ravening sire. Thenceforward the bees took over the charge of him, bringing him daily rations of honey until he grew up and was able to hold his own in the Olympian theogony. In either case Jupiter showed his gratitude towards his preservers in true celestial fashion. It was a very ancient belief among the earliest writers that, in the single instance of the honey-bee, the ordinary male-and-female principle was abrogated, and that the propagation of the species took place by miraculous means. In explanation of this, we are told it was a special gift from Jupiter in acknowledgment of the unique service rendered him. In one version of the fable, and in the words of a famous bee-master who wrote in 1657, “Jupiter, for so great a benefit, bestowed on his nurses for a reward that they should have young ones, and continue their kind, without wasting themselves in venery.” In the other, and probably much older form of the legend, Melissa, the beautiful Princess of Crete, was herself changed by the god into a bee, with the like immaculate propensities; and thenceforward the work of collecting honey for the food of man—that honey which, down to a very few centuries from the present time, was universally believed to be a miraculous secretion from heaven—was confided to her descendants. Apart, however, from the old dim tales of ancient mythology, where there is a romance to account for all beginnings of the world and everything upon it, any attempt to trace back the art of bee-keeping to its earliest inception cannot fail to bring us to the conclusion that it is inevitably and literally the oldest craft under the sun. Thousands of years before the Great Pyramid was built, bee-keeping must have been an established and traditional occupation of man. It must have been common knowledge, stamped with the authority of the ages, that a beehive, besides its toiling multitudes, contained a single large ruling bee, divine examplar of royalty; for how else would the bee have been chosen to represent a King in the Egyptian hieroglyphic symbols? But it is not only within the limit of historical times, however remote, that evidences of bee-culture, or at least of man’s use of honey and wax in his daily life, are to be found or inferred. So far back as the Bronze Age it is certain that wax was used in casting ornaments and weapons. A model of the implement was first made in some material that would perish under heat. This was imbedded in clay, and the model burnt out, after which the mould thus formed was filled with the molten metal. These models, no doubt, were in many cases carved out of wood; but it is certain that another and more ductile material was often used. Bronze ornaments have been found with thumb-marks upon them, obviously chance impressions on the original model faithfully reproduced. And the substance of these models could hardly have been anything else than beeswax. But speculation on the probable antiquity of bee-keeping need not stop here. The best authorities estimate that human life has existed on the earth for perhaps a hundred thousand years. The earliest traces of man, far back in the twilight of palæolithic times, reveal him as a hunting and fighting animal, in whom the instinct to cultivate the soil or domesticate the creatures about him had not yet developed. Later on in the Stone Age—but still in infinitely remote times—it is evident p. ix p. x p. xi p. xii that he tamed several creatures, such as the ox, the sheep, and the goat, keeping them in confinement, and killing them for food as he required it, instead of resorting to the old ceaseless roaming after wild game. At this time, too, he took to sowing corn, and even baking or charring some sort of bread. It must be remembered that if a hundred thousand years is to be set down as the limit of man’s life on the earth, probably the development of other living creatures, as well as most forms of vegetable life, took place immeasurably earlier. The chances are that the world of trees and flowering- plants, in which aboriginal man moved, differed in no great degree from the world of green things surrounding human life to-day. It is certain that the apple, pear, raspberry, blackberry, and plum were common fruits of the country-side in the later Stone Age, for seeds of all these have been found in conjunction with neolithic remains. Evidence of the existence of the beech and elm—the latter a famous pollen-yielder—has been discovered at a very much earlier time. All the conditions favourable to insect-life must have been present in the world ages before man appeared in it; and insect-life undoubtedly existed then in a high state of development. It would be as unreasonable, therefore, not to infer that the honey-bee was ready on the earth with her stores of sweet-food for man, as that man did not speedily discover that store, and make it an object of his daily search, just as he went forth daily to hunt and kill four-footed game. There is, of course, a great deal of difference between a chance discovery of a wild-bee’s nest, as a common and expected incident in a day’s foraging, and the systematic preservation and tending of beehives as a source of daily food. While it is reasonable to assume that the first men used honey as an article of diet, it is probable that they were a wandering race, never halting for long in the same locality, and therefore unlikely to be bee-keepers in the accepted sense of the word. They depended, no doubt, on the wild honey-stores which they happened to find in their entourage for the time being. But the first sign of civilisation must have been the gradual lessening of this nomadic instinct. Tribes would come to take permanent possession of districts rich in the game, as well as the fruits and tubers, necessary for their daily food. At the same time the haunts of the wild bees would be discovered, their enemies kept down or driven away, the places where the swarms pitched annually noted, and thus the first apiary would have been founded, probably long before any attempt at cultivation of the soil or domestication of the wild creatures for food was made. Biologists generally regard hunting as the oldest human enterprise under the sun; but, adopting their well-known method of deductive reasoning, it seems possible to make out a rather better case for beemanship in this category. The primæval huntsman must have found much difficulty in bringing down his game, and still more in securing it, when maimed, but yet capable of eluding final capture. For this purpose some sort of retrieving animal, fleeter of foot and more cunning than its master, must have been even more necessary in primæval times than it is in the modern days of the gun. There seems to be no evidence of man indicating the most elementary civilisation without sure signs also that he had trained and used some sort of dog to help him in his daily food-forays. But man must have existed long before civilisation can be said to have come within age-long distance of him. In these times, beset with enemies, he must have built his hut nest-like in some high, impregnable tree, out of reach of night-prowling foes; and it is scarcely conceivable that the dog was his companion under these conditions. More probably he lived, for the most part, on fruits and honey- comb, and such of the small creatures as he could capture with his naked hands. Thus, in all likelihood, the first hunter was a bee-hunter. Eolithic man may have had his own rocky fastness or clump of hollow trees, where the wild bees congregated; and with the coming of each summer he may have followed his swarms through the glades of primæval forests as zealously as any bee-keeper of the present day. Speculation of this kind is necessarily far-fetched and fantastic, and can be but half seriously undertaken with so small and inconsiderable a creature as the honey-bee. But it is interesting from one special, and not often adopted, point of view. There is no more fascinating study than that of the ancient civilisations of the world. Egypt 10,000 years ago, Babylon probably still earlier, China that seems to have stopped at finite perfection in all ways that matter little, ages before the time of Abraham. But all these are of mushroom growth compared with the antiquity of bee-civilisation. It is only a tale of Lilliput, of a microscopic people living and moving on a mimic stage. Yet, perhaps tens of thousands of years before man had made fire, or chipped a flint into an axe-head, these winged nations had evolved a perfect plan of life, and solved social problems such as are only just beginning to cloud the horizon of human existence in the twentieth century. And they, and their intricate communal polity, have not passed away into dust, as the great human nations of bygone ages have done, and as those of the present day may be destined to do, for all we can tell. Will a time come when we must learn from the honey-bee or perish? We have still probably a few thousand years wherein to think it out, and prepare for it; but unless the world comes to an end, or human increasing-and-multiplying comes to an end, one earth will eventually become too small to hold us. With this thought in mind, a study of the honey- bee and the arrangements of hive-life, takes on a new interest. Supposing that the political economy of a beehive may be taken as a foreshadowing of the ultimate human state, there is no denying that we get a glimpse into an eminently disquieting state of things, at least from the masculine point of view. We see matriarchy triumphant; the females holding supreme control in the State, and not only initiating all rules of public conduct, but designing and carrying through all public works. The male is reduced to the one indispensable office of sex, and even a single exercise of this is vouchsafed only to a few in a thousand. But to create the large and permanent army of workers necessary in a State such as this, and to recruit it wholly from the females, it became necessary to revise all rules of life from their very foundation. There must have been a great renunciation among the bees, male and female alike, when the resolve was made to leave the whole duty of procreation of their kind to one pair alone of their number—one pair only out of every thirty thousand or so—in order that the rest could devote themselves to ceaseless, sexually unincommoded toil. This may be imagined as following on a great discovery, an epoch-making discovery, changing the whole face and future of bee-life—how, by the nursing and feeding of the young grub of the female bee, she could be atrophied into a p. xiii p. xiv p. xv p. xvi p. xvii p. xviii mere, sexless, over-intellectual labourer, or glorified into a creature lacking, it is true, all initiative and almost all mental power, but possessing a body capable of mothering the whole nation. Here is socialistic political economy carried to its sternest, most logical conclusions. All is sacrificed for the good of the State. The individual is nothing: the race is everything. “Thorough” is the motto of the honey-bee, and she drives every theory home to its last notch. Men are pleased to call themselves bee-masters; but the best of them can do no more than study the ways of their bees, learn in what directions it is their will to move, and then try to smooth the way for them. The worker-bees collectively are the whole brains in the business, and the bee-keeper is as much the slave of the conditions and systems they have inaugurated as they are themselves; while the queen-bee is the most willing, and, at certain seasons, the most laborious slave of them all. It is useless to deny that bee-polity, with its stern dead-reckoning of ingenuity, its merciless adherence to the demands of a system perfected through countless ages, has its unpleasant and even its revolting aspects. Nature is always wonderful, but not always admirable; and a close study of the Life within the Hive brings out this truth perhaps more clearly than with any other form of life, humanity not excepted. Absolute communism implies incidental cruelty: it is only under a system of bland political compromise, of neighbourly give and take, that justice and mercy can ever be yoke- fellows. In the republic of bees, nothing is allowed to persist that is harmful or useless to the general good. Every individual in the hive seems to acquiesce in this common principle—either by choice or compulsion—from the mother- bee down to the last lazy drone, born into the brief plenty of waning summer days. In the height of the honey-flow, the State demands a storehouse filled to the brim; and every bee keeps herself to the task unceasingly until death from overwork comes upon her, and her last load never reaches the hive. If the queen-bee grows old, or her powers of egg- laying prematurely fail, she is ruthlessly slaughtered, and her place filled by another specially raised by the workers to meet this contingency during her lifetime and in her full view. Drones are bred in plenty, plied with the richest provender in the hive, and allowed to wanton through their days of insatiate appetite, so that no young queen may go forth on her nuptial flight unchallenged. But when the last princess is happily mated, and safely home again in the warm, awaiting cluster, every drone is callously done to death, or driven out of the hive to perish. If hard times threaten, or the supply of stores is arrested, the old and worn-out members of the hive are exterminated, breeding is stopped, the unborn young are torn from their cradle-cells and destroyed, so that there may be as few mouths as possible to fill in the lean days to come. The signs of dawning prosperity or adversity are watched for, and the working population of the hive is either increased or checked, just as future probabilities seem to indicate. But the most bewildering, most uncanny thing of all about this bee-republic is the fact that, in it, has been successfully solved the problem of the balance of the sexes. While all other creatures in the universe bring forth their kind, male and female, in what seems a haphazard, unpremeditated way, these mysterious hive-people cause their queen-mother to give them either sons or daughters according to the needs of the community. They lead her to the drone-cells, and she forthwith deposits eggs that hatch out infallibly as drones; and in the combs specially made wherein to rear the aborted females, the workers, the queen is caused to lay eggs that just as assuredly produce only the worker-bee. It is the oldest civilisation in the world, this wonderful commonwealth of the bee-people, and it is not unprofitable to examine it in the light of ideas which are at present only flickering up uncertainly on the distant path, but which might well broaden out some day into general conflagration. It is conceivable that a time existed when the conditions of bee-life were very different from those we see to-day. Bees have drawn together into vast communities, just as men are slowly, but surely, gathering into cities. A time may come when individual existence outside the city may be as impracticable for men, as life has become for separate bee-families away from the hive; and then there may arise a purely masculine dilemma. It may be that once the magnificent drone was of real consequence in domestic affairs. Bee-life may have consisted of numberless small families, each with its deep-voiced, ponderous father-bee, its fruitful mother, and its tribe of youngsters growing up, and in time setting forth to establish homes for themselves. There is no reason why each one of the thirty or forty thousand pinched virgins in a hive should not have become a fully developed, prolific queen-bee, if only the right food, in sufficient quantity, had been given her in her larval state. But the need for the single large community arose. The system of a single national mother was instituted. The great renunciation was made, for good or ill. And then the trouble, from the masculine point of view, began. It must be borne in mind that, strictly speaking, the honey-bee does not, and never did, possess a sting. What is commonly known as her sting is really an ovipositor, and it is as such that it is almost exclusively used by the modern queen-bee in every hive to-day. But when the first hordes of worker-bees were brought into the world, reduced by the science of starvation to little more than sexless sinews and brains, they seemed to have conceived a terrible revenge on their ancestors. The useless ovipositor was turned into a weapon of offence, against which the drone’s magnificent panoply of sound and fury availed him nothing. Matriarchy was established at the point of the living sword. A pitiless logic overran everything. Intolerance of all the bright asides of life—the wine, the dance, the merry talk, and genial tarryings by the path, beloved of all drones, bee or human—darkened the day. And the result is only more honey, a vaster storehouse filled to the brim with never-to-be-tasted sweets, at a cost unfathomable, when the old larder would have sufficed for every real need, and life might still have been merry and leisurely. It is only a fable, far-fetched, fantastic, as any told to the Caliph in the “Arabian Nights.” But there, again, the woman had her way, like the bee-woman before, and some day she and her kind may get it on a more ambitious scale. And then—what of the sword that was once a sewing-needle? “Some are content with saying that they do it by Instinct, and let it drop there; but I believe God has given p. xix p. xx p. xxi p. xxii p. xxiii p. xxiv us something farther to do, than to invent names for things, and then let them drop.”—A. I. Root. CHAPTER I THE ANCIENTS AND THE HONEY-BEE “While great Cæsar hurled War’s lightnings by high Euphrates, . . . even in that season I, Virgil, nurtured in sweet Parthenope, went in the ways of lowly Quiet.”—Fourth Book of the Georgics. It was in Naples—the Parthenope of the Ancients—that the “best poem by the best poet” was written, nearly two thousand years ago. Essentially an apostle of the Simple Life, the cultured and courtly Virgil chose to live a quiet rural existence among his lemon-groves and his bee-hives, when he might have dwelt in the very focus of honour at the Roman capital; where his friend and patron, Mæcenas, the prime minister of Octavian, kept open house for all the great in literature and art. Modern bee-keepers, athirst for the Americanisation of everything, give little heed nowadays to the writings of one whom Bacon has called “the chastest poet and royalest that to the memory of man is known.” And yet, if the question were asked, What book should first be placed in the hands of the beginner in apiculture to-day? no wiser choice than this fourth book of the Georgics could be made. For Virgil goes direct to the great heart of the matter, which is the same to-day as it was two thousand years ago. The bee-keeper must be first of all a bee-lover, or he will never succeed; and Virgil’s love for his bees shines through his book from beginning to end. Of course, in a writer so deeply under the spell of Grecian influences, it is to be expected that such a work would faithfully reproduce most of the errors immortalised by Aristotle some three hundred years before. But these only serve to bring the real value of the book into stronger relief. Through the rich incrustation of poetic fancy, and the fragrant mythological garniture, we cannot fail to see the true bee-lover writing directly out of his own knowledge, gathered at first hand among his own bees. Virgil knew, and lovingly recorded, all that eyes and ears could tell him about bee-life; and it is only within the last two hundred years or so that any new fact has been added to Virgil’s store. All the writers on apiculture, from the earliest times down to the eighteenth century, have done little else than pass from hand to hand the fantastic errors of the ancient “bee-fathers,” adding generally still more fantastic speculations of their own. And until Schirach got together his little band of patient investigators of hive-life about a hundred years ago, Virgil’s fourth Georgic—considered as a practical guide to bee-keeping—was still very nearly as well-informed and up-to-date as any. It is not, however, for its technical worth that the book is to be recommended to the apiarian tiro of to-day. All that has become hopelessly old-fashioned with the passing of the ancient strawskep in the last generation. The intrinsic value of Virgil’s writings lies in their atmosphere of poetry and romance, which ought to be held inseparable, now as ever, from a craft which is probably the most ancient in the world. Almost alone among country occupations to-day, bee-keeping can retain much of its entrancing old-world flavour, and yet live and thrive. But if the modern tendency to make the usual unlovely transatlantic thing of British honey-farming is to be checked, nothing will do more to that end than an early instillation of Virgil’s beautiful philosophy. Dipping into this fascinating poem—with its delightful blend of carefully told fact, and rich fancy, and quaint garnerings from records then extant, but now lost in the ages—we can reconstruct for ourselves a picture of Virgil’s country retreat near “sweet Parthenope,” where he loitered, and mused, and wrought the faultless hexameters of the Georgics with so much care and labour, that the work took seven years to accomplish—which is at the rate of less than a line a day. Virgil’s house stood, probably, on the wooded slope above the town of Naples, deep set in orange-groves and lemon- plantations, and in full view, to the north, of the snow-pinnacled Apennines, and, southward, of the blue waters of the Bay. Vesuvius, too, with its eternal menace of grey smoke, rose dark against the morning sun only a few leagues onward; and, at its foot, the doomed cities nestled, Pompeii and Herculaneum, then with still a hundred years of busy life to run. Bee-hives in Virgil’s day—as we can gather from certain ancient Roman bas-reliefs still in existence—were of a high, peaked, dome pattern, and they were made of stitched bark, or wattled osiers, as he himself tells us. Many of the directions he gives as to their situation and surroundings are still golden rules for every bee-keeper. The bee-garden, he says, must be sheltered from winds, and placed where neither sheep nor butting kids may trample down the flowers. Trees must be near for their cool shade, and to serve as resting-places when “the new-crowned kings lead out their earliest swarms in the sweet spring-time.” He tells us to place our hives near to water, or where a light rivulet speeds through the grass; and we are to cast into the water “large pebbles and willow-branches laid cross-wise, that the bees, when drinking, may have bridges to stand on, and spread their wings to the summer sun.” Virgil’s method of hiving a swarm is almost identical with that followed by old-fashioned beemen to this day. The hive is to be scoured with crushed balm and honeywort, and then you are to “make a tinkling round about, and clash the cymbals of the Mother”—that is, of the goddess Cybele. The bees will forthwith descend, he tells us, and occupy the p. 1 p. 2 p. 3 p. 4 p. 5 prepared nest. When the honey-harvest is taken, you are first to sprinkle your garments and cleanse your breath with pure water, and then to approach the hives “holding forth pursuing smoke in your hand.” And the old-time bee-man of to-day takes his mug of small-beer as a necessary rite, and washes himself before handling his hives. But perhaps the great charm of the fourth Georgic consists, not in its nearness to truth about bee-life, but in the continual reference to the beautiful myths, and hardly less attractive errors, of immemorial times, copied so faithfully by mediæval writers, but not apt to be heard of by the learner of to-day unless he reads the old books. Virgil begins his poem by speaking of “heaven-born honey, the gift of air,” in allusion to the belief that the nectar in flowers was not a secretion of the plant itself, but fell like manna from the skies. He seriously warns his readers of the disastrous effect of echoes on the denizens of a hive, and of the hurtful nature of burnt crab-shells; and tells us that in windy weather bees will carry about little pebbles as counterpoises, “as ships take in sand-ballast when they roll deep in the tossing surge.” He was a firm believer in the Divine origin of bees. To all the ancients the honey-bee was a perpetual miracle, as much a sign and token of an omnipotent Will, set in the flowery meadows, as is the rainbow, to modern pietists, set in the sky. While all other creatures in the universe were seen to produce their kind by coition of the sexes, these mysterious winged people seemed to be exempt from the common law. Virgil, copying from much older writers, says, “they neither rejoice in bodily union, nor waste themselves in love’s languors, nor bring forth their young by pain of birth; but alone from the leaves and sweet-scented herbage they gather their children in their mouths, thus sustaining their strength of tiny citizens.” Just as marvellous, however—at least to the modern entomologist—will appear the belief, widespread among the ancients, and shared by Virgil, that swarms of bees can be spontaneously generated from the decaying carcass of an ox. Virgil professes to derive his account of the matter from an old Egyptian legend, and he gives careful directions to bee-keepers of what he seems never to doubt is an excellent method for stocking an apiary. There is a very old translation of the passage in the fourth book of the Georgics relating to these self-generated bees, which is worth quoting, if only on account of its quaint mediæval savour. “First, there is found a place, small and narrowed for the very use, shut in by a leetle tiled roof and closed walles, through which the light comes in askant through four windowes, facing the four pointes of the compass. Next is found a two-year-old bull-calf, whose crooked horns bee just beginning to bud; the beast his nose-holes and breathing are stopped, in spite of his much kicking; and after he hath been thumped to death, his entrails, bruised as they bee, melt inside his entire skinne. This done, he is left in the place afore-prepared, and under his sides are put bitts of boughes, and thyme, and fresh-plucked rosemarie. And all this doethe take place at the season when the zephyrs are first curling the waters, before the meades bee ruddy with their spring-tide colours, and before the swallow, that leetle chatterer, doethe hang her nest again the beam. In time, the warm humour beginneth to ferment inside the soft bones of the carcase; and wonderful to tell, there appear creatures, footless at first, but which soon getting unto themselves winges, mingle together and buzz about, joying more and more in their airy life. At last, burst they forth, thick as rain-droppes from a summer cloude, thick as arrowes, the which leave the clanging stringes when the nimble Parthians make their first battel onset.” For a study in the persistence of delusions, this affords us some very promising material. In the first place, the generation of bees from putrescent matter is, and must always have been, an impossibility. If there is one thing that the honey-bee abhors more than another, it is carrion of any description. Indeed, putrid odours will often induce a stock of bees to forsake its hive altogether; so it cannot even be supposed that bees would venture near the scene of Virgil’s malodorous experiment, and thus give rise to the belief that they were nurtured there. But not only was this practice a recognised and established thing in Virgil’s time, but entire credence was placed in it throughout the Middle Ages down, in fact, to so late a time as the seventeenth century. It is on record that the experiment was carried through with complete success by a certain Mr. Carew, of Anthony, in Cornwall, at an even later date still. The practice, moreover, was of infinitely greater antiquity than even Virgil supposed. He was probably right in giving it an Egyptian origin, and this alone may date it back thousands of years. In Egypt the custom had a curious variant. The ox was placed underground, with its horns above the surface of the soil. Then, when the process of generation was presumed to be complete, the tips of the horns were sawn off, and the bees are said to have issued from them, as out of two funnels. Nearly all the ancient writers, with the exception of Aristotle, mention the practice in some form or other. Varro, writing half a century before Virgil, says, “it is from rotten oxen that are born the sweet bees, the mothers of honey.” Ovid gives the story of the Egyptian shepherd Aristæus as enlarged upon by Virgil, and adds some speculations of his own. He suggests that the soul of the ox is converted into numberless bee-souls as a punishment to the ox for his lifelong depredations amongst the flowers and herbage, the bee being a creature that can only do good to, and cannot injure, vegetation. Manifestly, where there is so general, and so widely independent a corroboration of a story, some explanation must exist, which will alike bear out the truth and condone, or at least extenuate, the error. A careful examination of the various accounts of bee-swarms having been produced from decaying animal matter reveals one common omission in regard to them. All the writers are agreed that dense clouds of bee-like insects are evolved; and speak of these as escaping into the air and flying off, presumably in the immediate quest of honey. But no one bears testimony to honey having been actually gathered by these insects, nor is it recorded that they were ever induced to take possession of a p. 6 p. 7 p. 8 p. 9 p. 10 hive, as ordinary swarms of bees will readily do. They are spoken of more as enriching the neighbourhood generally, by augmenting the number of bees abroad, than as conducing to the well-being of any particular bee-owner. Herein, no doubt, is to be found a clue to the whole mystery. If it was not the honey-bee—the Apis mellifica of modern naturalists—which was generated from the entombed body of Virgil’s unfortunate bull-calf, what other insect, closely resembling a bee, could have been produced under those conditions? The answer has been readily given by several naturalists of our own time. There is a fly, called the drone-fly, which exactly meets the difficulty. He is so like the ordinary honey-bee that on one occasion, and that recently, he was mistaken for the genuine insect by one calling himself a bee-expert, and holding a diploma officially entitling him to the use of that name. This drone-fly would have behaved almost exactly as Virgil’s calf-bred bees are said to have behaved, and according to the various descriptions of the matter given by other writers living before and since. He would issue forth in a dense cloud immediately his natal prison-doors were opened, and he would comport himself in other ways exactly as enumerated. Finally, he would beget himself joyously to the open country, as a swarm of bees would do; and once more the Virgilian theory of bee- production would meet with its seeming verification. But having gone thus far with the drone-fly, it is difficult to resist going a little farther. We cannot leave him in the ignominious company of slaughtered oxen, but must give him his due of more lordly associations. “Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.” When Samson went down to Timnath on his fateful mission of wooing, and saw the carcass by the way beset with a cloud of insects, we need not cast any doubt on his genuine belief that they were honey-bees. He propounded his riddle in all good faith, and the form of it can very well be explained as a not undue stretch of allowable poetic privilege. But that the creatures he saw hovering about the dead lion were really bees, and that Samson actually obtained honey from the carcass, is not to be accepted without the exercise of a faith that is undistinguishable from credulity. Many attempts have been made to explain away the difficulties of the problem on natural lines, but they are all alike unconvincing. There is little doubt at this time that the part of the story dealing with the honey is nothing but a deft embroidering on the original legend by some later chronicler; and that the insects which were seen about the dead lion were really drone-flies generated in the same fashion as those from Virgil’s ox. Perhaps no better general idea is to be obtained of the condition of bee-knowledge among the ancients than from the writings of Pliny, the Elder, who was born in A.D. 23. He, too, deals with the ox-born bees; but the reader’s interest will centre for the most part in Pliny’s grave and careful account of the life and customs of the honey-bee, as commonly accepted among his contemporaries. Very few indeed of the facts he so picturesquely details have any real foundation in truth. Like nearly all the classic writers, he had little more accurate knowledge of the life within the hive than we have of the bottom of the Pacific Ocean But he made up for this deficiency, as did all others of his time, by dipping largely into the stores of his own fancy as well as those of other people. His account of the origin and nature of honey is quaintly pleasant reading. “Honey,” he says, “is engendered from the air, mostly at the rising of the constellations, and more especially when Sirius is shining; never, however, before the rising of the Vergiliæ, and then just before daybreak. . . . Whether it is that this liquid is the sweat of the heavens, or whether a saliva emanating from the stars, or a juice exuding from the air while purifying itself—would that it had been, when it comes to us, pure, limpid, and genuine, as it was when first it took its downward descent. But, as it is, falling from so vast a height, attracting corruption in its passage, and tainted by the exhalations of the earth as it meets them; sucked, too, as it is, from off the trees and the herbage of the fields, and accumulated in the stomachs of the bees, for they cast it up again through the mouth; deteriorated besides by the juices of flowers, and then steeped within the hives and subjected to such repeated changes:—still, in spite of all this, it affords us by its flavour a most exquisite pleasure, the result, no doubt, of its æthereal nature and origin.” Modern bee-keepers ascribe the varying quality in honey nowadays to the prevalence of good or bad nectar-producing crops during the time of its gathering, or to its admixture with that bane of the apiculturist—the detestable honey-dew. But Pliny set this down entirely to the influence of the stars. When certain constellations were in the ascendant, bad honey resulted, because their exudations were inferior. Honey collected after the rising of Sirius—the famous honey- star of all the ancient writers—was invariably of good quality. But when Sirius ruled the skies in conjunction with the rising of Venus, Jupiter, or Mercury, honey was not honey at all, but a sort of heavenly nostrum or medicament, which not only had the power to cure diseases of the eyes and bowels, and ameliorate ulcers, but actually could restore the dead to life. Similar virtues were possessed by honey gathered after the appearance of a rainbow, provided—as Pliny is careful to warn us—that no rain intervenes between the rainbow and the time of the bees’ foraging. On the life-history of the honey-bee Pliny wrote voluminously. He tells us of a nation of industrious creatures ruled over by a king, distinguished by a white spot on his forehead like a diadem. These king-bees were of three sorts—red, black, and mottled; but the red were superior to all the rest. He appears to accept, though guardedly, the old legend that sexual intercourse among bees was divinely abrogated in favour of a system of procreation originating in the flowers. He mentions a current belief—which must have been the boldest of heresies at the time—that the king-bee is the only male, all the rest being females. The existence of the drones he explains away very ingeniously. “They would seem,” he says, “to be a kind of imperfect bee, formed the very last of all; the expiring effort, as it were, of worn-out and exhausted old age, a late and tardy offspring.” The discipline in the hives was, according to Pliny, a very rigid affair. Early in the morning the whole population was awakened by one bee sounding a clarion. The day’s work was carried through on strict military lines, and at evening p. 10 p. 11 p. 12 p. 13 p. 14 the king’s bugler was again to be observed flying about the hive, uttering the same shrill fanfaronade by which the colony was roused at daybreak. After this note was heard, all work ceased for the day, and the hive became immediately silent. His book abounds in curious details as to hive-life. When foraging bees are overtaken in their expeditions by nightfall, they place themselves on their backs on the ground, to protect their wings from the dew, thus lying and watching until the first sign of dawn, when they return to the colony. At swarming-time, the king-bee does not fly, but is carried out by his attendants. Pliny warns intending bee-keepers not to place their hives within sound of an echo, this being very injurious to the bees; but, he adds, the clapping of hands and tinkling of brass afford bees especial delight. He ascribes to them an astonishing longevity, some living as long as seven years. But the hives must be placed out of the reach of frogs, who, it seems, were fond of breathing into hives, this causing great mortality among its occupants. When bees need artificial food, they are to be supplied with raisins or dried figs beaten to a pulp, carded wool steeped in wine, hydromel, or the raw flesh of poultry. Wax, Pliny says, is best clarified by first boiling it in sea-water, and then drying it in the light of the moon, for whiteness. And in taking honey from the hives, a person must be well washed and clean. Malefactors are cautioned against approaching a hive of bees at any time. Bees, he assures us, have a particular aversion to a thief. To the latter-day practical bee-keeper, all these minute details given by the classic writers read very like useless and cumbersome nonsense; and it seems matter for wonder that the bees contrived to exist at all under such ingeniously complicated mismanagement, born, as it was, of an ignorance flawed by scarcely a single ascertained fact. But the truth stands out pretty clearly that bee-keeping two thousand years ago was really a very large and important industry. One apiary is mentioned by Varro as yielding five thousand pounds of honey yearly, while the annual produce of another brought in a sum of ten thousand sesterces. Pliny mentions the islands of Crete and Cyprus, and the coast-country of Africa, as producing honey in great abundance. Sicily was famous for the good quality of its beeswax, but Corsica seems to have been one of the main sources of this. When the island was subject to the Romans, it is said that a tribute of two hundred thousand pounds’ weight of wax was yearly exacted from it. This, however, is such an astounding figure that it must be taken with a certain caution. Evidently the bees in the ancient world managed their business in fairly good fashion, in spite of the ignorance of their masters, or at least of the ancient chroniclers de re rustica. But it should always be borne in mind that the writers on husbandry and kindred subjects were seldom practical men. With the single exception, perhaps, of Virgil’s “Georgicon,” these old books relating to apiculture bear unmistakable evidence of being, for the most part, merely compilations from writings still more ancient, or heterogeneous gatherings together of hearsays and current fables of the time. It is certain that the men who were actually engaged in the craft of bee-keeping, and who knew most about it, wrote nothing at all. Probably they concerned themselves very little with the myths and fables of bee-craft, and owed their success to hard, practical, everyday experience, which is the surest, and perhaps the only, guide to-day. CHAPTER II THE ISLE OF HONEY If we are to accept all that the old Roman historians have put on record to the glory of their race, we must believe that their conquering legions found everywhere barbarism, and left in its place the seeds of a high civilisation—high, at least, in the general acceptance of the word in those lurid, moving days. But it may well be questioned whether the Britain that Cæsar first knew was as barbaric as it has been painted. We are accustomed to look upon Cæsar’s account of his earliest view of Albion—of Eilanban, the White Island, as the Britons themselves called it—as the first glance vouchsafed to us into the history of our own land. But this is very far from being the truth. British history begins with the record of the first voyage of the Phoenicians, who, adventuring farther than any other of their intrepid race, chanced upon the Scilly Isles and the neighbouring coast of Cornwall, and thence brought back their first cargo of tin. And how long ago this is who shall say? The whereabouts of the Phoenician Barat-Anac, the Country of Tin, remained a secret probably for ages, jealously guarded by these ancient mariners, the first true seamen that the world had ever known. They were expert navigators, venturing enormous distances oversea, even in King Solomon’s time; and that was a thousand years before the advent of Cæsar. In all likelihood they had been in frequent communication with the Britons centuries before the Greeks took to searching for this wonderful tin-bearing land, and still longer before the name Barat-Anac became corrupted into the Britannia of the Romans. And it is hardly to be supposed that a people of so ancient a civilisation, and of so great a repute in the sciences and refinements of life, as the Phoenicians—a people from whom the early Greeks themselves had learned the art and practice of letters—could remain in touch, century after century, with a nation like the Britons without affecting in them enormous improvement and development in every way that would appeal to so high-mettled and competent a race. For high-mettled and capable the Britons were even in those old, dim, far-off days. Cæsar’s account of them, read between the lines, accords ill with the commonly accepted notion of a horde of savages, pigging together in reed hovels, p. 15 p. 16 p. 17 p. 18 p. 19 p. 20 and daubing their naked bodies blue to strike terror into the equally savage minds of their island adversaries. We get a glimpse of a people much farther advanced in the arts of peace and war. In all probability they clothed themselves at ordinary times, picturesquely enough, in the furs of the wild animals, with which the island abounded; and it was only in war-time that they stripped and painted. Old prints have familiarised us with the sight of the sailors of Drake and Nelson stripped much in the same way; and the blue paint of Druidical times is not divided by so great a gulf as the ages warrant from the scarlet cloth and glittering brass-ware of nineteenth-century fighting-men. As armourers the ancient Britons must have been not immeasurably inferior to the Romans, and we are told that they excelled in at least one difficult craft, the making of all sorts of basket-ware. But there is other testimony, apart from Cæsar’s, in favour of the view that they were by no means a barbarous people. Diodorus Siculus, who was Cæsar’s contemporary, speaks of them as possessing an integrity of character even superior to that commonly obtaining among the Romans; and Tacitus, writing about a century later, ascribes to them great alertness of apprehension, as well as high mental capacity. Protected as they were by the sea, it is probable that war entered to no large extent into their lives, and they were essentially a pastoral people. The cultured and daring Phoenician traders are certain to have prospected the coast much farther eastward than is recorded, and thus to have materially hastened British advance in civilisation—at least, as far as the southern tribes were concerned. It has been claimed—on what evidence it is difficult to determine—that the Romans, besides teaching the Britons all other arts of manufacture and husbandry, introduced the practice of bee-culture into the conquered isles. But Pliny, giving an account of the voyages of Pytheas, which are supposed to have been undertaken some three hundred years before Cæsar ever set foot here, mentions the Geographer of Marseilles as landing in Britain, and finding the people brewing a drink from wheat and honey. There is, however, another source of testimony on this point, of infinitely greater antiquity than any yet enumerated. Long before the Phoenician sailors discovered their tin-country, there were bards in Eilenban—the White Island—hymning the prowess of their Celtic heroes and the traditional doings of their race. These old wild songs were handed down from singer to singer through the ages, and many of them, still extant among the records of the Welsh bards, must be of unfathomable antiquity. These profess to describe the state of Britain from the very earliest beginnings of the human race. And in some of them, which are seemingly among the oldest, Britain is called the Isle of Honey, because of the abundance of wild bees everywhere in the primæval woods. There would be little profit, and no little folly, in seeking to invest these old traditions with any more than their due significance. But there is much in a name. And it may be conjectured that if Britain was known among the early Druidical bards...