_Death Omen by Bees._--It is not wonderful that the remarkable instincts
and intelligence of the honey-bee, its domesticity, and the strong
affinity of its social habits to human institutions, should make it the
object of many superstitious observances, and I think it probable that
if enquiry be made of that class of people amongst whom such branches of
folk-lore are most frequently found lingering, other prejudices
respecting bees than those lately noticed by some of your correspondents
might be discovered.
If the practice of making the bees acquainted with the mortuary events
of the family ever prevailed in that part of Sussex from whence I write,
I think it must be worn out, for I have not heard of it. But there is
another superstition, also appertaining to mortality, which is very
generally received, and which is probably only one of a series of such,
and amongst which it is probable the practice before-mentioned might
once be reckoned. Some years since the wife of a respectable cottager in
my neighbourhood died in childbed. Calling on the widower soon after, I
found that although deeply deploring a loss which left him several
motherless children, he spoke calmly of the fatal termination of the
poor woman's illness, as an inevitable and foregone conclusion. On being
pressed for an explanation of these sentiments, I discovered that both
him and his poor wife had been "warned" of the coming event by her going
into the garden a fortnight before her confinement, and discovering that
their bees, in the act of swarming, had made choice of a _dead hedge
stake for their settling-place_. This is generally considered as an
infallible sign of a death _in the family_, and in her situation it is
no wonder that the poor woman should take the warning to herself;
affording, too, another example of how a prediction may assist in
working out its own fulfilment.
Seeing that another P-urveyor to your useful P-ages has assumed the same
signature as myself, for the future permit me, for contradistinction, to
be--
"J. P. P.," but not "CLERK OF THIS PARISH."