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,
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
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 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 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 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
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 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 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.